the great frank zappa

i felt a terrible loss when frank zappa died. he died of prostate cancer in 93. he was about to turn 53. it's not much of a consolation, but lucky for us humans, he was an incredibly prolific and perceptive artist and person. i entertained the idea that the government knocked him off because he was just too smart and subversive and proactive, or that he knew too much. i'd read an interview where he discussed the power of sonic waves, that sound could actually be used to control people or even kill people. for a while there was a movement going to get him to run for president. he was very politically aware and had lots of good ideas. i'd like to live in that world, where zappa could actually get nominated... that would be a better world.

his music is a balm to my soul. it feels healing and dynamic, like something's happening inside me when i listen to it, like wounds are being tended. it's not a cerebral appreciation. it's very visceral. and i just discovered a great album of arrangements by the ensemble ambrosius. re-workings of some of zappa's classics like "RDNZL" and "inca roads." sweet arrangements.

i once had a dream i was taking a shower with frank. it wasn't sexual, but it was very intimate. i woke up feeling so close to him, it was excellent. yeah i know it's ridiculous, put it on the same list with my dream that i was hanging out in an apartment with andy and colin from XTC, or when i had become the 4th beastie boy (AdRoc mentored me). 

but you know, thank God for dreams because otherwise i never would have had these amazing opportunities.

new technology

despite my apparent devotion to my iPod, i have upgraded to a new iPod which contains more memory. ah, the fickleness of the music-obsessed consumer.

so now i have room to put everything in my little silver lozenge, even my extensive frank zappa collection, much of which i haven't listened to since 1998. wow, "artificial rhonda." just wow.

as for the old iPod, i have taken care of it, taken care to provide it with a caring new owner, which just happens to be my boyfriend david. so it's all in the family.

missions

today david and i packed up some water and snacks in a backpack and drove out to mission concepcion. we walked around the church for a while then, after a brief tussle, drove to mission san jose, which is bigger and more impressive than mission concepcion because of its living quarters skirting the perimeter of the grassy area and the relative scope of the place. i liked to imagine the indians having affairs in the grass with wayward fathers, or escaping the mission walls under cover of night, coyotes baying in the background. we walked around there a while, then set off on the mission trail. we got about halfway to mission san juan then turned around and walked back. i'd say we walked somewhere between 4-5 miles in all. it was fun walking along the san antonio river (the real one, instead of the riverwalk), and we both needed the exercise and the sun.

why did my mom never take me to the missions when i was growing up? i realize she was busy and all, having four kids, and me being the youngest, well i guess she was tired by that time, always multi-tasking and then she got her own career going, so in some ways i understand... yet i also felt amazed at the thought that we have these incredible, historical monuments to colonialism in the guise of spirituality in our fair city and we never visited them even once!

the only time i've been to a mission (well, besides the alamo, which seems tiny in comparison) was at my friend mikki's wedding. i've forgotten which mission it was, but it was a beautiful place to get married. i was fantasizing about getting married to david at one of the missions. one of us would have to dress as a woman to fool the priests. i was imagining david in blonde wig and tight raspberry taffeta.

so tonight i put lotion on my face. i feel like my summer is now complete, having acquired a sunburn; and it couldn't be at a more appropriate time of year-- the autumn equinox.

this is not an ad for facebook

(and the last entry was not an ad for iPod.)

a few weeks ago, prodded by a friend of mine, i set up a facebook account... begrudgingly. i don't know why i was so reluctant. i guess it seemed like something 'young' people do, like people of my students' age. and true enough, most of my contacts have been former students, but there have been other contacts as well, like theatre people in the area.

but this week i had two great surprises.

there comes a time on facebook when you start racking your brain for old, old friends-- like the kind of friends who are so old they've become kind of legendary in your mind, because all your memories of them have been so rehashed over the years, and it's been so long since you've spoken to them.

one of the friends i got in touch with was philip, my next-door neighbor from childhood. we had a lot of fun together doing kid things, and he had a pool at his house AND a tennis court we played on. i wasn't sure he would want to contact me, because i was kind of a weirdo as a kid (i'm TOTALLY normal now, make no mistake), but phil wrote back and asked how the hell i am. he is now living in phoenix and has a little family going.

there was an even bigger reaction, however, last night, when my best friend from first, second and third grade (my first, and therefore truest best friend) responded to my friend invitation. his name is j.j. and i have all kinds of memories and stories about him. i hadn't seen or spoken to him since he moved away to tucson after fourth grade. nary a word. so you can imagine, over the past thirty years there's been plenty of time to miss him, wonder where he is, and think about all the things we did as kids. this is the kid i loved so much that i threw a rock at his head. it's true.

last night all my long-standing questions about j.j. came to a resolution. he's an aerospace engineer (he was always really smart), has a wife and three kids, and lives in nearby austin. he looks great in his photo, still like himself and not transformed by the overwhelming grief of life. i don't know if we will keep in touch or rekindle our friendship, but the important thing is just to know he's well and thriving in the world, and that he actually does exist outside my memory. it's a nice feeling and... well, it's a life-changing event.

iPod pleasure

when did i start loving music? when did i start really paying attention to it?

my brother had this huge LP collection. then he won a drawing at a local music store and won something like 500 more LPs. it was a huge deal. a lot of them were garbage, but a lot of them were worth keeping. if you had a question about a band or an album, craig would usually know the answer. he gave me hand-me-down 8-track tapes of rickie lee jones, earth wind & fire, and barry manilow. and later he gave me cyndi lauper's "she's so unusual" on vinyl, and linda ronstadt's awesome rock album, "mad love," which featured at least two elvis costello covers.

craig gave me my first mixed tape, "music for white men" (i was called "white man" as a child because i was so lacking in pigment), when i was a freshman in high school, right around '81-'82. it contained: laurie anderson, the roches, randy newman, mel torme, peter gabriel, the violent femmes, todd rundgren, the shangri-las, xtc, kid creole & the coconuts, jonathan richman, tom waits, godley & creme, dionne warwick, tom tom club, frank sinatra, the waitresses, loudon wainwright III, bryan ferry, the beatles, lindsey buckingham, and kate bush. this particular tape, i have since realized, shaped my sense of what a music collection should be-- eclectic, above all... also, surprising, fanciful, with blasts of the past and the future. i have told craig about the debt i owe him for bringing such a broad and rich spectrum of musical taste into my life. i don't claim to have particularly good taste; but you can't deny it's eclectic.

this broad and rich spectrum has taken on many vehicles over the years (walkmans, car stereos, discmans), but the most recent and most amazing vehicle so far has been my iPod. now i have sensed the backlash against iPods, and i understand it-- there's something a little evil about them in the sense that they are becoming ubiquitous and that they seem to cut people off from each other. true enough. my pleasure in the iPod is the still mind-staggering fact that my e n t i r e  m u s i c  c o l l e c t i o n can reside within its perfectly compact rectangular body. something about this fact turns me on no end. i can float down memory lane by flipping to "sandwiches of you" whenever i want. all those songs i love can be in my pocket at all times. i made an iPod playlist of "music for white men" and it is beautiful... still beautiful.

i got my iPod in may of '07 and have been loading it down with pretty much every album in my possession since then. it is now reaching its maximum capacity (i have only 2 GBs left out of 80) and so i have been worrying that i am either going to run out of room or that it will crash and i will lose all that beautifulness. 

so i have been considering ways to insure the iPod. since i don't necessarily still have all the cds that are contained on it, and i wouldn't necessarily feel happy about sitting down to download them all again, i was considering purchasing another iPod and transferring all the music on the existing one onto a new one. i saw in a magazine that there's a doohickey you can get which will plug into two iPods and transfer files from one to the other. i researched that a bit, and it seemed more complicated than i had in mind.

but yesterday i downloaded Music Rescue 4.0. what it does, according to the apple tech worker i spoke with, is: "it sucks the music out of your iPod and into a file, then you can download it onto your iTunes." so that's what i did-- i got Music Rescue, plugged in my iPod and my external hard drive (120 GB), and backed up all my music onto my hard drive. 

talk about bliss. bliss. as tootsie says, "sheer heaven."

that oboe/clarinet solo on joni mitchell's "down to you." the irresistable whistling hook on "young folks" by peter bjorn & john. kate bush's roar on "get out of my house." hey, i remember where i was when i first heard that. i remember the feeling i had. 

surprises

this week i got a great surprise-- i was asked to be the stieren guest artist at trinity university here in town. the stipulations of this residency are that i will teach 5-6 master classes, give a 45-minute public lecture, and act in a production of austin pendleton's play BOOTH with drama students at trinity. i am thrilled about this, for several reasons-- it gives me a chance to work with students on the university level; the part of junius booth in BOOTH will be challenging for me (now that i'm 40 i guess i can sort-of legitimately play a 50-something year-old); and my financial concerns will be assuaged for another blissful period of time. beyond all these particulars, this fellowship being offered means something in general for my life and my decisions that is very exciting, and which fran verbalized well in an email yesterday: "I think you drew all these things to you by embracing your desires-- how magical is that?"

today i noticed that someone named "rocketts" posted a comment on this blog. as i investigated, i discovered a newly-established blog called Box 104C which seems to chronicle in pictures the KITUS years at schoolhouse. 

being a man of the moment, i often live as if i had just been born, forgetting, for all intents and purposes, that i have led a rich, sumptuous, moist, creamy, chunky, volatile, teary-eyed, screamy, itchy, sexy, international existence. but seeing the blog Box 104C reawakened my memory of some wonderful moments in my life, reconnected me to them, thereby enriching my current moment of existence. thanks rocketts, much love to you.