My two sons, AKA Unorganized Hancock, are feverishly preparing for their two, really big performances at the Skowhegan, Maine River Fest. Well, they’re not feverish, exactly. They are a little sweaty from time to time, though. Saturday, August 3rd at noon at the big beer garden tent, and Sunday the 4th at 10:00 for brunch at the pickup cafe. Come on by, and don’t throw anything at them that they can’t pawn.
My wife and sons bought me a bicycle for my birthday. It’s a Schwinn. Looks like a tank, rides like a sofa. I haven’t ridden a bicycle in twenty-five years. That is to say, I think I haven’t ridden a bicycle in twenty-five years. Who the hell knows what I’ve been up to for twenty-five years? I sure don’t.
We live on what’s called a city lot. It’s only sixty feet wide, and fronts the street with only twenty feet or so of setback. The street I live on used to be the main road into town from west of here, but they built a highway behind our house, along the river, and our road became the one less traveled by. People still drive way too fast on it. Many of the houses are empty in this town, and people think “rural” and drive like it everywhere here. I don’t let my younger son ride his bike on our road alone.
I mentioned “people” earlier; but for all intents and purposes, there are no people here. Western Maine is emptying out; some collect in the southeast appendix of Maine — Portland — and the rest plain leave. There are few people and no children. Fewer people and no children has been a dream of many in my lifetime. It was never mine. If you saw what it looked like, it might change even the most hardened heart about the concept.
I wanted my son to ride his bicycle. I wanted to ride a bicycle with him. My wish was granted. A wish granted is wonderful thing, truly. I put the bicycle together in the basement a while ago, and waited for the 21-day bout of torrential rain to let up. Today is in the low eighties, and sunny. It’s Sunday. Let’s go, dad.
The entire town of Rumford is on a hill of some sort. Steep ones. The front of my house is two storeys tall, the back is four. It’s daunting to ride most of these hills. We dashed down our street over a couple of humps and valleys, and found a lane that’s tilted like a bockety table instead of a rollercoaster, and pedaled back and forth on it for a pleasant 45 minutes or so. The road is being repaved, so only the scratch pavement is on it, but it’s the smoothest patch of pavement in town. The underground structures wear orange cones for party hats here and there, and make it jolly to dodge around them. The pines have shed their needles for the season on the street, and mix their perfume with the smell of fresh rain and flowers in the air. The road goes from noplace to nowhere, and there are only a half-dozen houses on the whole length of it, and you can ride as you like without risking a flattening.
I’d forgotten the idiot joy of being on a bicycle. I rode a half-length behind and to the left of my little son, and the look on his face reminded me of it immediately. It’s gently, gently uphill one way, and then minutes of long, languid cruise downhill the other way.
Slow down, dad, and let me win!
I’m sorry, but there is no way you can win, son. I’ve won already.
(Many thanks to Kathleen M. for her constant support of this website)
Unorganized Hancock are back! They’ve got a cool new logo, and a new video, Yesterdays by Wes Montgomery:
It was — get this — over sixty degrees, so the boys recorded outside. No, really; it was over sixty degrees, all at the same time, instead of broken into pieces and spread over several days. Farenheit!
Wes Montgomery was such a wonderful and original player. I don’t know why my kids have such good taste. I think they’re supposed to be playing death metal at flight-deck volume or they’ll be thrown out of the garage band union, but they don’t show any inclination to annoy us or the neighbors yet.
Speaking of annoying the neighbors, Unorganized Hancock has a gig. There’s a converted church in town that has a real stage in it, along with function rooms and so forth, and my boys are appearing there next Friday night: It’s called 49 Franklin. (Scroll down to see their promo picture). They’re headlining, but they’re playing first. The drummer is a pro, but he’s got to be in bed by nine, so they’re going to blast away for an hour at 7:00 PM. Good luck to the band that has to follow them. How do you follow that?
Many thanks to everyone that’s hit the tip jar for the boys, and linked to their videos, and hit the like buttons on YouTube and Facebook. The Heir and The Spare had a difficult couple of weeks, and the love and support they receive from my Intertunnel mob means the world to them. And me. (Special thanks to Malcolm from America’s hat) We now have a computer that will play 1080p video (thanks, Cliff E !), and we were able to purchase a big hard drive to put the videos on. The boys have a keyboard now, too, and can both play it some. Look for that soon. The boys are improving by leaps and bounds these days. Me, I don’t even know which end of the piano you blow in.
(Update: Many thanks to Phil B. from Yucca Vall-E!)
(More Up To Date: Many thanks to Kathleen M. from CT for her friendship and support)
(Way Update: Thanks a ton to Stephen L. in Ohio for helping the boys out!)
We’re immensely grateful for the support the boys receive from my readers. They’re good kids, and level-headed, so they don’t make the usual mistake aspiring musicians make: Going to the music store and buying expensive and superfluous things instead of practicing. But some problems are amenable to an application of money. An expensive guitar doesn’t make you a good player. But you can buy more pixels and ram them into your videos for a few bucks.
What a lot of progress they can show since the first grainy and dark Flip-cam performance they made in our attic. The video above is remix of Take Five from two weeks ago. The Heir was able to get some software that could handle Hi-Def video. No computers in our house can handle the hi-def files, but the new software allows you to work on them in lo-def and then upload them to YouTube in up to 1080p goodness. We have a Roku box, and our TV only goes up to 720p, but it’s as clear as a DVD on the screen now, and in widescreen, too, which they weren’t able to do before using only Windows Movie Maker. The sound quality is higher, too. The two cameras we purchased a little while back were capable of recording in hi-def, and now they can make use of it. The Heir also has new monitor speakers on his computers that reproduce more of the full range of sound the two of them make. He told me that he used to mix the songs on his recorder by fiddling with them, then putting them on a thumb drive, bringing them downstairs, and then listening to them on my ancient XP computer because I had a subwoofer and it was the only way he could hear if the bass was recorded audibly enough. Then he’d go back upstairs and fiddle with it some more and try again. He did it like that for months without me knowing about it. He’d only go in my office when I wasn’t there. Kids are inventive like that sometimes. It’s the reason they’re the only persons in your house that can work the child safety locks on all the cabinets when they’re toddlers.
Dave, who dared the kids to play a Neon Trees song months ago and demanded I put up a tip jar for them, wrote in the comments the other day:
Sometimes when I feel sad I go to the Unorganized Hancock youtube channel and all my troubles seem to melt away
What a lovely sentiment. My wife and I do the same thing. The boys feel the enthusiasm for their efforts coming right through the Intertunnel, and it buoys their efforts. The Heir has also started taking music lessons over Skype from the best music teacher I’ve ever heard of, never mind met. He’s my brother. He also taught me to play years ago, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. It wasn’t his fault I never applied myself. I learned just enough music to make my wife pay five bucks to meet me, and that was plenty for me. If the boys apply themselves, they might be able to charge their prospective mates twenty bucks to meet them some day.
The Roku box lets you watch YouTube videos on your TV if you know how to set it up, and we had fun watching related videos after watching our boys. There were many that were middle and high schoolers playing songs for captive audiences of parents, with songs obviously chosen by their teachers or by someone that doesn’t like them very much. They all looked like beat dogs the whole time. I think our boys know already that music is not supposed to be entertaining for yourself, it’s supposed to entertain the audience. It’s fun and gratifying if you can pull it off, but you are not there to be amused by the audience. But it’s not supposed to make you sad, for crissakes. In my past life, I termed it “Facing the Other Way.” If you face the other way from the audience, you have certain duties and obligations, and occasionally, privileges. The boys seem clear on the concept already, which will hold them in good stead in the real world in the future.
The hi-def video files are huge. We’re purchasing a stand-alone hard drive to hold them. The boys are almost done with their next numbah, and it’ll put Take Five in the shade, I’m tellin’ ya. They owe it all to you, my Interfriends.
[Update: Kathleen M. in CT’s continuing support is a wonder. Many thanks!]
(Thanks to reader and commenter BJM for slipping the video into my comments the other day)
Way to go, kid.
And mom and dad, too. There’s the rub. I see the hand of mom and dad in that video, and the cold, dead hands of legions of moms and dads that came before them. Teachers, too; although sometimes they’re the same people. Some teachers still try under trying circumstances.
I was sick until this morning, and abed. That’s rare. We do not send our children to the petri dish they call a school here in town, and are spared a lot of such things. But I laid there like a casualty and got my information about things in the house second-hand. I heard all sorts of things.
I was unable to make a fire, but they got made all the same, as I have a family and we do things together all the time. I could do what my wife does, and she managed to tend the furnace. The kids help out.
I got all my information like a submariner would. Shut up, away from everyone, but still hearing the sounds of familiar things. My wife would bring me ginger ale and crackers and updates. Life, boiled down to short messages, can be wonderful.
The kids were on tenterhooks because their mom told them I was ill. Kids raised properly are attuned to disruptions in routines. Kids raised in unsalubrious surroundings are inured to most everything. Everything’s in an uproar all the time so they don’t notice, or care.
My wife was teaching the little feller. There was some discussion about his older brother, who will finish high-school level homeschooling this year. He had questions about what that meant. “Your brother wants to be a musician when he is a man,” my wife said to him; “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be a musician, too,” he said, though I wonder about that. He’s sort of a wunderkind in a small area of musicianship — he can do simple things almost effortlessly. But he has not shown the dogged determination that his older brother has shown at learning music. He is very young and might change his mind, and be one of those people I used to hate: people that could play music better than you could, but never had to try at it.
He wasn’t done. “I want to be a husband. I want to be a father.”
That is an astonishing thing to hear. Why should it be astonishing to hear a nine-year-old wants to grow up and be a husband and father? It shouldn’t be, but it is. If he’d uttered that in a public school, I imagine he’d be in a re-education camp by nightfall. And on the flip side, I don’t think the term “wife and mother” can be uttered in public school without a SWAT team of egalitarians being called.
My children don’t want to be musicians because they dream of drug abuse and licentiousness and a vision of being carried around on a litter chair by flunkeys. My older son was old enough to have come to my music shows and seen the real work it was. He still wanted to do it, because work doesn’t scare him. They both want to be productive citizens, useful to other productive citizens. They want to be husbands and fathers, with everything that means.
It is everything we’ve wanted for them. When the little one shows flashes of genius, I dread it. You do not want to be wonderful in this world, son. Wonderful is a big millstone in the swimming pool of life. I wanted to be normal my whole life, and during my lifetime on earth, being “normal” has gotten so strange that your mother and I are living on the edge of civilization hanging on by our fingernails.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living. — Mark Twain
I want you to at least have a chance at being normal, if you want it. There are so few people committed to being useful, salubrious, and carrying on their traditions, and then having or supporting families that will rhyme down the centuries, that you’ll be wonderful enough if you manage it.
The Intertunnel is like my submarine, too. I get pinged, literally and figuratively, all the time. I feel the water temperature by putting my hand on the hull. Leslie from out west is kind enough to read, and comment, and buy furniture, and send the boys some shekels for their music videos. She is one of the many people I call my Interfriends: People I don’t know, and most likely will never meet, but they’re my friends. They know about me and mine, and I know something about them and theirs. If everyone that corresponds with me here were my actual instead of virtual neighbors, I’d live in the most interesting and pleasant town on earth. Leslie sent me a picture of her now grown, formerly homeschooled daughter’s work. She makes cakes. But saying she makes cakes is like saying Da Vinci was a housepainter. So I get to say something I’ve been dying to say since I was a little kid watching TV in the sixties: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have a really big shoe.
My little son especially thought this was the bee’s knees. “It’s a shoe with a big upheel!” He makes up more, and better words than Chaucer.
Leslie’s daughter is grown up, and I’d tell you she’s beautiful but I’m an old man and not supposed to notice such things, so I won’t mention it; and her parents tried, and obviously succeeded in producing a fully actualized person, ready and willing to be a good and productive (and inventive) citizen, and maybe someday produce her version of the same thing all over again.
We are a merry band here at the Cottage, busy being normal. We know we’re not alone, because we hear the thrumming on our bulkheads. We know you’re out there. There are plenty of people still trying to be decent citizens, and produce some more, by hook or by crook. We need a secret handshake or something.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers –and sisters.
Tag: The Spare Heir
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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