Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Nov 30, 2009
You know, once I get this b-boy thing under control, parkour is next.
Nov 25, 2009
I miss a lot of things about college--the classes, the sense of intellectual engagement, the unreasonably late hour I could roll out of bed in the morning--but one of the things I miss most is the opportunity for obsession that comes from a flexible schedule. The more I work on learning breaking and popping, the more evident it becomes that I just don't have time to vaccuum up skills at the same rate that I did as an undergraduate.
I tell this story a lot, but I started learning to play bass around the end of my junior year, and I was completely obsessed with it. I spent three or four hours every day practicing. I took it to class. I played along with my roommate's awful techno music. I drilled the same basic riffs--Flea's slap routine for "Higher Ground" and his solo during "Aeroplane," Commerford's simpler runs in Rage Against the Machine, every song from Stop Making Sense--and simple scale exercises over and over again. I got blisters, put superglue on my fingers as prosthetic calluses, eventually grew thick skin on the first two fingers of my right hand from plucking the strings.
I was, in short, pretty hardcore about my practice routine. The result is that while I claim no particularly exceptional skill as a bass player, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to play the instrument at some level until the day I die. It's totally-engrained muscle memory at this point. But looking back on it now, I'm pretty sure that there's no way I could have learned to play at the same depth--even allowing for a slower pace--if I were to start today. I just wouldn't be able to make the time, or the intensity. And when it comes to the speed at which I'm learning to b-boy, that's a hard mental adjustment to make, because I unconsciously expect to improve at the same rate.
Clearly, it's just a symptom of adult life. I work an 8-hour day with two hours of commute, so I don't have blocks of time between classes or shifts that I can devote to hobbies. Since the CQ purchase and resulting transition shakeup, I've gotten a few extra responsibilities (including some team management), and when I get home often the last thing I really want to do is sweat profusely in my apartment's laundry room. So at this point I practice popping and breaking two, maybe three times a week for around an hour at a time. Progress is slow, my footwork is still awful, and my shoulders are still way too stiff.
That said, what can you do? I enjoy my work, and don't have any desire to cut it short in any way. It's already hard enough to coordinate with Belle between my classes and the ones she teaches at the gym. And let's face it: my goal for dancing can't be (and isn't) to be the greatest, since I'm starting it late and from a very poor foundation. There's a lot to be said for aiming high--but just as much value in keeping excessive expectations from ruining the learning experience as it changes.
Sep 03, 2009
Breakin' 3: Thomas Breaks a Knee
Thanks to Jeff for the title.
Last Friday was the last lesson of my first breakdancing class (the next session starts in two weeks). If I could find my camera, I'd embarrass myself with a movie clip, but conveniently it seems to have gone missing. So what have I learned?
I've learned it's going to take a while for me to get up the nerve to enter an actual cipher with people I don't know. Which is good for me, honestly: in general I'm a quick learner, so I have a tendency to acquire new skills and then lose interest once I hit a basic level of competency. The hobbies I've maintained for longer periods--like bass, for example--required more sustained effort but are ultimately more rewarding. I think this could be one of those.
I've learned a lot about movement. I am not what you'd call light-footed: my normal gait is somewhere between a stalk and a strut. My favorite part of toprock is its constant motion, and its sense that the dancer is never really settling their weight. Although I need a lot more work before it's completely natural, I'm really having fun practicing those kinds of steps--it's a new way for me to move. The same goes for footwork and freezes: even if I'm terrible at them (and I am), they're entirely new movements for my body, and thus both a challenge and a kind of puzzle.
And technically, I've learned how to: sidestep, kickball change, hip twist, indian step, kick step, CC, six-step, four-step, three-step, helicopter, shoulder freeze, and backward roll. I may not be able to do them well, or to move from one to the other gracefully, but that's about twelve more dance moves than I've ever had before. I guess I'm all set to go be highly awkward at family weddings now.
Aug 18, 2009
Electric Boogaloo sold separately.
Who Can Roast The Most?: Lessons Learned
On Sunday, the "Who Can Roast The Most?" b-boy competition came to DC for the first time ever, and my dance teacher encouraged us to go. "You'll learn a lot," she said, and I did--not the least of which is how much I've got to learn. There were some seriously skilled dancers there.
My favorite part was seeing really smooth top-rockers. Floorwork, spins, and power moves may get the biggest reactions from the crowd, but they don't always match up with the beat. The really good top-rockers, being less worried about keeping their momentum up for acrobatics, could react to the music and play with the crowd. They had more stage presence, so to speak, and as a musician I thought their performances were a lot more fun to watch. The music was great, too--a mix of funk (James Brown, in particular) and old-school hip-hop (they opened, of course, with Black Star's "B Boys Will B Boys").
I only stayed through the end of the second round, but it was enough to get me excited about learning breakdancing all over again. I'm heading to an open class in DC tonight, and will try to be better about practicing at home from now on.
Something From Nothing: Youtube As Cultural Transmitter
One thing that's been really helpful for me has been the wealth of video tutorials available online for the basic steps. Some of them suffer from Sudden Jump In Difficulty Syndrome, where they go directly from doing basic steps to a mile-a-minute routine, but there's also some really good amateur lessons online. At the very least, it's good to be able to look up how things are supposed to look, or to refresh my memory of the steps involved, when my memory starts to fade a few days after Friday's class.
I'm curious how--or indeed, if--it changes the process of cultural propagation, when it's mediated this way. And that's not just for breakdancing, obviously: I learned to play bass at least partially via online communities and resources. I learned harmonica in much the same way (thanks, HARP-L!) in high school. Eventually, I found communities both on- and offline for playing music, but it was certainly a modern twist on "self-taught" skills.
One of the interesting tidbits from my classes so far has been the way that a lot of breakdancing moves have multiple names, depending on which part of the country (or world) you're in. They're often named after the crew that invented them, or at least got the credit for introducing them in an area. Will that kind of idiosyncracy survive a transition from geographic identification to something more nebulous?
There's a paragraph from Jeff Chang's collection Total Chaos, in the section written by South African hip-hop students Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams, where they compare hip-hop to alchemy:
We don't mean this only in the old-school mystical chemistry way. We see hip-hop as the resilience of the human spirit, that process of transforming yourself and your environment, kinda like Common's observation that under the FUBU is a guru untapped. Imagine the oppressive conditions caused by the barbarism of Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic strategies. The youth of South and West Bronx had little resources, were systematically marginalized and alienated, but filled with an audacity and inner capacity to want to rock the planet. No musical equipment? Well, then beatbox! We've heard many heads equate hip-hop with producing something out of nothing. We disagree. Hip-hop is about seeing the something in what we are often told is nothing.
It is, no doubt, lazy tech-utopian thinking to say something like "YouTube could influence hip-hop"--or to act like a bunch of largely middle-class kids uploading videos means anything about the direction of a culture I'm largely unqualified to comment on (like, I read a couple of books and took a class, so I'm an expert now, right?). It might be more accurate to say that the reverse is true--that YouTube's untidy mix of professional content, cultural detritus, and amateur-authored mementos sounds very much like the spirit that Ariefdien and Abrahams identified for hip-hop (even down to the critics who dismiss said content as nothing but valueless narcissism). Something to think about.
Aug 07, 2009
Tonight I'm attending the second of five Intro to Breakdancing classes in Bethesda. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'd been reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and watching Planet B-Boy on Netflix. And I've always had trouble A) dancing and B) exercising, so why not learn to do both?
It didn't surprise me that I'm a bit short on the coordination necessary to be a natural breakdancer, or that my hip-hop attitude is somewhere between Don Draper and Michael Bolton. It shouldn't have surprised me how out of shape I am, especially given how athletic a style of dancing it is, but for some reason it did. I'm hardly able to switch feet during basic floorwork, much less perform something like a chair freeze. I'll probably be able to manage a decent top-rock (dancing from a standing position) by the end of the classes, but the rest is anyone's guess.
Belle has been very gracious about all this. She snuck me into one of the gyms where she's an aerobics instructor so I could use the mirrored room, and did some practicing of her own in the other corner. I know she feels like she could be in better shape herself, but she's capable of jumping around (while simultaneously shouting directions) for one-hour classes multiple times a week, while I do about thirty seconds of indian steps and then stagger around the room gasping for air. "You looked good," she says, perhaps on the principle that the last words I hear before my atrophied lungs give out should be encouraging ones.
I'll get through this class if it kills me. But let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Dec 03, 2008
Playing with other musicians for the first time, especially after noodling around solo for so long, has a lot in common with the process of culture shock. At first, there's a general wariness on the part of everyone involved, followed by a stretch of amusement and acclimation to musical quirks and customs, then acceptance, and finally (I often find) weariness and longing for familiar ground.
In other words, ad-hoc practice with a set of metal-heads didn't entirely end well. But it was illuminating.
Ultimately, experiencing other countries proves more of an education about your own, and that's certainly true musically. For example, my own context is rock- and blues-oriented, which means that I unconsciously base my playing and writing around the emphasis of certain beats in 4/4 time. I've gotten comfortable with that. But in a lot of harder metal and prog rock, primacy is given to the riff: a pattern of notes in a rhythm independent of the measure's basic beat, and which may even necessitate odd time signatures, like 5/4 or 9/8.
I don't know if this makes me a musical bigot, but I really hate odd time signatures. Four on the floor, baby.
But here's the other thing: when you come into contact with another musical culture, there are customs that end up being enforced. Just as intercultural communication, your role changes as you negotiate a common ground of understanding. And in my case, it ends up being constricted, which drives me crazy.
See, the job of the bass (or any instrument, really, but particularly bass) in rock music is circumscribed by the other band members. It exists in the space left over. If the guitarists insist on using distortion and heavy chords at all times, it cuts into the bass's ability to add effects or play in the upper register. Or, on the other hand, if the keyboard starts emphasizing left hand lines, now there's competition for the traditional bass role. You can try to fight for position, but I find that bass is at a disadvantage in these situations: it doesn't have the range of keys, or the volume of a cranked guitar rig (remember, higher frequencies require less energy to create at an equivalent loudness--and I hate volume wars anyway).
So the funny thing is, I got invited to jam because of my solo bass work, which crosses into a wide range of sonic territory, only to find myself relegated back to playing root notes on the clean preamp channel. Everything else got lost in the soup of distorted guitar crunch. I admit to being puzzled: this was not an unforeseeable outcome. So why invite me in the first place?
Dec 28, 2007
For my family, Christmas is a time to sit around and talk. For Belle's family, my impressions are that it's quite a bit noisier, and involves karaoke.
I'll be honest: I never really got the appeal of karaoke before. It always seemed silly to me. To a musician, the idea of performing with a pre-taped backing track is vaguely akin to cheating--not to mention not nearly as much fun as playing the songs for real.
But on Tuesday, I had a kind of an epiphany while watching people sing along with the cheesy MIDI versions of "Desperado" and a long set of Filipino pop songs. There's a kind of feeling that comes from being in a band and playing music with other people--performers share energy through the act of coordinating rhythm and melody. It's a communal experience. Karaoke is a way for people who think that they're not good at music to get that same feeling.
It reminds me of a passage from Daniel Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music:
Jim Ferguson, whom I have known since high school, is now a professor of anthropology. Jim is one of the funniest and most fiercely intelligent people I know, but he is shy - I don't know how he manages to teach his lecture courses. For his doctoral degree at Harvard, he performed field work in Lesotho, a small nation completely surrounded by South Africa. There, studying and interacting with a local villagers, Jim patiently earned their trust until one day he was asked to join in one of their songs. So, typically, when asked to sing with these Sotho villagers, Jim said in a soft voice, "I don't sing," and it was true: we had been in high school band together and although he was an excellent oboe player, he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. The villagers found his objection puzzling and inexplicable. The Sotho consider singing an ordinary, everyday activity performed by everyone, young and old, men and women, not an activity for a special few.Our culture and indeed our very language makes a distinction between a class of expert performers - the Arthur Rubensteins, Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys - and the rest of us. The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us. Jim knew that he wasn't much of a singer or dancer, and to him, a public display of singing and dancing implied he thought himself an expert. The villagers just stared at Jim and said, "What do you mean you don't sing?! You talk!" Jim told me later, "it was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs." Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody's lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone. The Sesotho verb for singing ( ho bina ), as in many of the world's languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.
That's the value of karaoke, and of Guitar Hero and Rock Band: they break down the barriers between "musicians" and "the rest of us," and allow people who don't think of themselves as musical (due to a deficiency in our cultural attitudes) to get in on the fun. For these purposes, the technical proficiency of the performance is less important than the community feeling it fosters. Criticising them for not being "real music" is beside the point.
Apr 16, 2007
It Rubs the Lotion On Its Skin
Great moments in band ad responses from Craigslist:
Apr 10, 2007
Have you seen this ridiculously pretentious article from the Washington Post Magazine? The writer got an award-winning classical violinist to play in a downtown Metro station here in DC, then put a camera on it to see how many people stopped to listen. Not surprisingly, no-one did, a fact that the author milks for all kinds of "why has beauty died?" angst.
It's possible to respond to this rationally: to mention, for example, that the people walking through L'Enfant Plaza station are probably going to work at the Department of Transportation, the FAA, the Department of Energy, or any of other government agencies located nearby, and if they're late they could be fired. They don't necessarily have time to listen to music, no matter how good it is. That would even be true if they're riding an efficient, reliable underground system, which (as any visitor to the city can attest) the DC metro is emphatically not.
You could also point out, to the author's snotty suggestion that every child stopped while every parent urged their wayward offspring on, that children also enjoy stopping to talk to crazy homeless people and eat candy that they find on the ground. Children are not flawless barometers of musical enchantment. When I was a kid I listened to Wee Sing and watched Ernest movies, but I don't see anyone suggesting that we should install the corpse of Jim Varney with a recording of folk songs in Metro stations. Kids in that part of town mean that the parents have to drop them off at daycare before work, which no doubt makes the family schedule less flexible.
Don't forget to take note of the "high culture" snobbishness of the article. How dare those lowlife office workers not recognize the genius of this world-class violinist, playing the greatest music ever made? Except of course that beyond a certain level of competency, hardly anyone ever notices the subtleties of musicianship. Most people are not musicians. They don't care that someone added a fine semi-tone quaver to a phrase, or that you did something tricky in the dorian mode there (good job, by the way!). Even many music buffs do not really notice the intricacies of a given tone or instrument. Especially, I want to stress, in a Metro station.
And is this the greatest music ever made? That's a little Eurocentric, isn't it? Why didn't the Post put a great tabla--or gamelan, or mbira--player into the Metro station? Perhaps because that music would be something a little more out of the ordinary. People might have actually stopped for that--still not many, during a morning rush hour, but a few. And then no-one gets to write a condescending article about it.
But I think the best response to the article that I've seen is from composer Richard Einhorn, a.k.a. Tristero at Hullaballoo. He writes that we should do this more often:
Exactly. And perhaps more importantly, let's stop putting those great musicians on pedestals in expensive auditoriums, where only the rich can pay to see them, and the price tag grants them a gleam of exclusivity far in advance of their talents. I'm not denigrating great musicians. I'm not saying that Joshua Bell's playing isn't a thing of great value. But instead, consider how terrible it is that most people will never really listen to this kind of music because it is presented poorly and to only a privileged few--or moreover, how discouraging it is for most people that good musicians are seen as untouchable (and unattainable) for the common man.
Jul 06, 2006
Open Mike Impressions: Under New Management
"He's got to learn the names of chords, instead of just playing them at me and assuming that I'll be able to figure it out," I say at the IHOP.
"Yeah, but you always manage it. That's why he keeps doing it," says Belle.
"Still."
It's been almost six months since I darkened the concrete stoop of Stacy's Coffee Shop for their open mike, and the event has evolved somewhat since then. An older man named John is running the show now, and he's a bit more organized, I guess. The old system was pretty much hit-or-miss, orchestrated through shouting back and forth with the barista. But in turn, most of the people that I used to see there are gone now--including almost all of the younger musicians. Have they been driven off? Did they go back to school? Like me, has work pulled them away? I don't know enough to say.
I end up on stage three times--once early on to waste some time, once with the white-boy bluesman who asked me to come (the same one I cut some basslines for a couple weeks ago), and last when the keyboardist finally shows up. There's an old joke: why was the keyboard player onstage with three bands in one night? Because it took the first two for him to set up! I am not sure that it's a joke anymore.
How does an open mike survive? It strikes me that they're like any organization. Some of them are strongarmed along by the charismatic and the insane, and without that person they fall apart. Others might be communal affairs, created and maintained by a fluid group. In both cases, the makeup changes, either through subtle selection ("This isn't really my kind of crowd") or the interpersonal equivalent of genetic drift. If I ever go back to school for a higher Communication degree, there's a paper in this.
