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More Unorganized Hancock Live Show Goodness To Improve Your Monday Markedly

March 31, 2014 3 Comments

If you just stumbled in (hey, who hasn’t from time to time) that’s my two sons, AKA Unorganized Hancock, performing at the Skowhegan, Maine Maple Festival a few weeks back. I watch these videos the same way you do. They entertain me. I don’t get any less or any more enjoyment out of them because they’re my kids. I help them as best I can, then as fast as I can manage it I go sit in the audience.

I’m told by various and sundry persons that being married and having kids and generally being of a traditional frame of mind about many things is either a near-insurmountable row to hoe, or a bad idea in the first place — children are too expensive, or the world is too full of people already, or some such. Others say western civilization in all its forms is very important, of course, but they make it sound like a directive to eat your vegetables. You’re supposed to do it, grimly, because otherwise society will fall apart.

I just don’t get any of it. My wife and children are delightful, and I never get tired of them, and they fill my house with a jolly tintinnabulation every day they aren’t out in the great, wide world making their racket for strangers. I never miss whatever it is I’m supposedly missing out on. Our life might be difficult, but my family is the cure for that, never the cause. And even if you think the world has too many people in it, it surely still has too few of the pleasant variety, so we tried to make some more.

And I hate to break it to you, but vegetables are just food, and I like eating food, and you should too.

[Many thanks to Andy B. in Indiana for his generous mash on the PayPal tipjar button in the right-hand column. I’m constantly amazed by the generosity of my readers]
[Update: Many thanks to longtime UH supporter Kathleen M. of Connecticut, who is as close to a perennial flower as this blog will ever see, for her ongoing generous contributions to our tip jar]
[Up-Update: Many thanks to Charles E. from The Land Of Enchantment for his very generous assault on our tip jar. I do not know anyone named Charles that isn’t a nice person. I don’t think they exist]

Like Watching Titian Grind Pigments: Wes Montgomery Arranges A Song In Real Time

March 29, 2014 1 Comment

Wes Montgomery sounds like he was a nice man, a commodity that can be somewhat hard to find in the music business. He had a wife and lots of kids. He supposedly learned to play guitar when he was already a man. He worked all day in a factory, practiced at night, and strummed the guitar with his thumb instead of a plectrum so he wouldn’t keep his wife and kids up all night. Odd things often make people wonderful. He was well-regarded enough to be touring almost right away, but didn’t like being away from his family, went back home and worked in a factory and played at local places again. Eventually he broke through and became international anyway. I don’t know anyone he’s playing with in the video, but this looks like European TV of some sort. The YouTube comments say they’re Dutch.

He’s a really rare specimen. He obviously always wanted to play in a manner that would be entirely accessible to the general public, but his chops and musicality commanded instant respect, even awe, from even the cool atonal kids. He’s one of those players that never seems to run out of variations on what he knows. He never seems to be repeating himself. Even towards the end of his career, when he did jazzesque versions of profoundly pedestrian pop songs, no one snickered behind his back. Wes Montgomery’s version of Windy might still be a version of Windy, but he never made anything worse. He wasn’t capable of it.

I think he needs to be considered among the most influential jazz musicians ever, because more people paid attention to him, one way or the other, than anyone else.

Still There (from 2007)

March 28, 2014 11 Comments

Ever work in a factory?

If you’re reading this page, the answer is likely no. I remember reading that if you are at a gathering of college educated persons, not one of them will know personally anyone who is not. They can cast around for the name of the plumber or something to make their working class bona fides, but it’s not the same thing. With a few exceptions, educated persons don’t know people who are not, and vice versa.

I am not fixing to hold myself up as any sort of example of anything. I don’t fit in anywhere and so am useless as any sort of ruler to measure such things. I drift along through many sets of people, and belong to none, really. Maybe I should be a writer. I have no fixed perspective.

I have worked in a factory. More than one. A big old brick building with tall windows and a punch clock and battered formica tables and two vending machines in a break room. Union, some of them, too. I know what it’s like. A lot of people who have never known work talk about the loss of belching smokestack factories like it’s a plague of locusts or something. If they ever worked in one they might feel differently. I can’t properly describe the sensation of eating your lunch out of a paper sack and reading an inexpertly printed missive from personnel (they used to call it that without shame) telling me, just 19 years old, that all I had to do is work another 49 years putting the same tiny screws into some holes while looking at a gauge, and I could retire with a little pension.

They never understood why I left. My fellow workers, grown old and crabby in the traces, tried to get me to explain, which I could not do without insulting them, and then, frustrated, barked at me that I’d be sorry. I never was. The factory has been shuttered and dark for decades now, and they all lost their jobs. The world is a shark and must always swim. I recognize the charlatans that say the shark must stand still no matter how they tart up the presentation. Numbskull Canutes want to rule the world.

There can be dignity there, in a factory. If there is work that is not dignified I have not seen it. You must bring the dignity with you, as in all things. It will not be supplied to you. It cannot be taken from you if you will keep it.

That picture is taken in 1940. There is certainly dignity in that picture, along with hard work and danger and a wage, and it shines right through. Old Kenyon’s Johnnycake Mill in Usquepaugh, Rhode Island. I used to visit the towns around there often in the summer. And the place is still there.

Kenyon’s Corn Meal Company

It’s marvelous it’s still there after centuries. The shark must swim. It does not devour all its young, though.

Still Better Dialog Than Anything George Lucas Ever Wrote

March 26, 2014 5 Comments

Kids writing scripts for grownups. It’s glorious. As opposed to Hollywood, where grownups wearing toddler clothes write scripts for kids pushing sixty.

We don’t send our children to public school, but we hear all about what goes on there. They’re always maundering on in the local papers about their bright new ideas — generally already discredited since the 1960s — about “teaching children to be more creative.” See, there’s your problem right there.

I don’t know exactly how dull you have to be to be a public school administrator, but school is supposed to try to put some sort of lid on a child’s creativity, and get them to add single digits without using a sundial as a stopwatch, and put apostrophes where they belong once in a while, for five goddamn minutes a day, at least. Children only have one problem, and that’s creativity. The reason you’re all still sitting at the dinner table after an hour and fifteen minutes has come and gone is because your seven-year-old is still building stonehenge with his french fries. That’s creativity, isn’t it?  The reason your bathroom smells like a cattle stall is all the creative ways that little Magellan you’re raising has figured out to circumnavigate the bowl. This video is like shooting fish in a barrel, which incidentally produces a very similar kind and amount of splashback.

If your kid doesn’t compose at least one insane opera a day that lasts from sunup to sundown, he’s not normal. A kid with that little imagination is luckily not common, but when he or she grows up, they’re likely to cause trouble, likely by becoming a public school administrator or a state senator. Claiming you’re going to teach children to be creative is like claiming you’re going to teach Mike Tyson to be aggressive. And your Common Core plan for teaching creativity? Well, as Mike once said, everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. 

Month: March 2014

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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