beautiful, funny, sad & true

You may have noticed that BFS&T is ‘back in black’ lately.  See, I’ve been trying a few different color schemes on for size (err, color), but so far I’ve been unable to find one that’s as striking and unusual as this one is.  In fact, a friend even told me the other night that he missed this old color scheme.  I have to admit that I agree with him.  The other ones I’ve tried in the interim have paled in comparison to it.

So here’s the black and blue, back by popular demand.

You’re welcome.

This month has been one of the busiest I’ve ever had.  Recording and/or rehearsals wish IrishBand almost every night, and one night Andrea came to visit and rehearse a song she wrote for her wedding, which is happening on Friday.  I’ll be playing cello and her sister will be playing piano.  From there we went to dinner at Por Que No (one of the best and most authentic (and least expensive!) Mexican restaurants in town) and then went to have coffee and play Scrabble at Palio, one of my favorite little coffee shops.

She won, by the way, but it was really close.  330-something to 314.  There will be a rematch, but I’m not sure when, since we won’t have a chance to hang out again before her wedding, and then of course she’ll be going to Canada for another ceremony with her family and then back to Switzerland, where she lives.

A couple more nights of rehearsals followed, and then I headed up to Seattle on Friday to play bass with my friend Brandon’s classic rock band.  Super fun to play and hang out with him again.  In the morning we went to breakfast and then I raced the three hours’ drive home to Portland, in order that I’d be back to set up for the IrishBand show at 4:30.

The show was a complete blast.  It featured a pair of dancers, an aerialist, a ukelele player, a sword swallower/fire breather, a martial arts/juggling/comedy group (Nanda; check ’em out.  They’re the coolest group ever, I promise you.), then IrishBand finished up with a set.  Oh, and then there was dancing for an hour or so after that.  It was a great time.  I’m not even going to attempt to describe everything, cause it would take too long, but my modus operandi is that if people do cool things in front of me while I’m holding a camera, it’s my duty to capture those moments.  Behind the scenes is where the real show always happens, anyway.

After partying for a few hours everything was set up and ready, we went out front and mingled a bit.

This picture is fuzzy (or was it just me?  har har) and terrible as far as quality goes, but at least you can get a sense of what the people and the main room were like that night. . .

. . .and then I handed my camera off to Whit, who took some pictures of the actual event while I climbed upstairs and sat in the balcony with the rest of IrishBand to stay out of sight of the audience and watch the show.

After Nanda were finished, we set up and rocked the house for about an hour.  Oh yeah. . .and then I danced.  Yes, believe it or not, it’s true.  I did some moonwalking (both forwards and backwards. . .dang right!) and a whole bunch of ‘normal’ dancing too.   A good time was had by all.  Those of us who were left at the end of the night had the pleasure of helping clean up the place and empty all of the risers and seats and everything out of it by loading them into trucks, but even that somehow ended up being a good time.

In other news, I’m going to see Yann frickin’ Tiersen (you know, who wrote the frickin’ Amelie soundtrack!) on Wednesday night here in little old frickin’ Portland.  And he’s not even playing at a huge venue, either, but the frickin’ Wonder Ballroom, which has about a 400-person capacity, and where I MYSELF HAVE PLAYED.  I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this.  I play the accordion because of him.  It’s true.

Le sigh.

I could watch this all day.  This kid (even at the age of, what, eighteen months?) has the act down pat.  He even knows how to use a microphone properly and time his arm movements with what he thinks he’s saying.  Those are skills that have to be learned, and he’s quite the little orator.

I used to have a much bigger chip on my shoulder about religion than I do these days.  I still kinda have one, which is why I find this video so utterly disturbing hilarious, but I’m much more tolerant of other peoples’ beliefs than I was when I was, say, twenty.  Suffice it to say that it’s a colossally good thing (both for me and the entire world) that I didn’t have a blog back then, but then I don’t think anyone did at that time; not even Steve Jobs or Al Gore.  Okay, maybe Al Gore did.

I think that might have been a digression just there.

The results are in, and it is, indeed, a digression.

I need to go put my laundry in the dryer now.  Oh wait. . .another digression?  Let’s find out, in the style of Family Feud.  “Di-GRESSION?  Survey SAYS. . .”  [sign on board flips over, and bell rings] Ding ding ding ding ding ding!  “Digression!”

Okay, I’m done.

How do you like the new blog theme, by the way?  It’s very different, and distinctly less blue, than all the others I’ve used before.  I wanted something a bit more cheerful.  I’m still learning how to tweak it, and working out a few issues I’m having (for some reason, my blogroll is showing up duplicated!?), but I think it’s cool.   Hello, spring!

The Indigo Girls were interviewed on NPR this morning.  Naturally, they also took the opportunity to play a couple of songs, one of which was “Closer to Fine” and the other was this one. . .

. . .called “Sugar Tongue.”  Loveitloveitloveitloveit.

It was just the two women and their guitars, and it was absolutely stellar.  This version has the electric piano, too, which is okay and all, but I found this acoustic version much more compelling than the ‘rock’ version from the CD (with the drums and everything), but discussing why I feel that way is actually a huge story in itself, all about music production, and the way I think about instrumentation and creating parts and textures, and all that kind of stuff.

That would be much too long a discussion, especially for a simple little entry saying that I love this song and that I want to share it with you.

I just now woke from a very poignant and disturbing dream that was short enough that I won’t tell it in the way that I normally recount my dreams; I’ll just describe it, and I think it’ll be better told that way.

The dream involved Twitter, of all things.  I was at my computer, catching up on all of my friends’ posts and perusing a few profiles to look for changes they might have made.  One friend’s home page had been deleted and replaced with a memorial page written by her father which said that she was now deceased, and that she was buried in a particular place, the address for which was published online, so I decided to pay her a posthumous visit and wish her spirit well.

The dream’s location changed, and I found myself in the funeral home, which was very elegant and lavish.  I was shown down a hall that resembled an abbey, with stone walls and only natural light.  I was shown into an open doorway, and the man gestured that this was the way I should proceed to her resting place.  I turned and walked down the dark, narrow passageway for about fifty feet, when the passage opened out into a small, European-style open air courtyard, with the wooden casket on a stand at one side of the courtyard.  It was all stunningly beautiful.  Wow, I thought, they really did things up right for her.

The casket was displayed at a forty-five degree angle, and it was about ten feet off of the ground.  Alongside the casket was a metal platform on wheels, with stairs, the kind they use at airports, where people could climb up and read the small embossed plaque that was visible on top of the casket.  As I walked toward the stairs and had a strange two-way conversation with myself in my head.  Is it weird that I came all the way out here for someone I only know from Twitter?  I don’t even know her full name, or indeed her REAL name.  Well, I mean, SOMEONE’S got to come visit her, so there’s that. I climbed up to the top of the platform and read the plaque, which I assumed was her name, but turned out to be the funeral director’s name.  “Embalmed by George R. Wilson” [or whatever his name was] and it gave the address of the funeral home.

I wanted to find out what my friend’s real name was, so I looked around for a sign or another plaque.  I couldn’t see any, so I climbed onto the actual casket itself, in order to investigate more closely.  Near the upper corners of the casket I found two small metal tags, one of which read, “CATHERYN” [Hunh, she spells her name very differently in real life, I thought.] and the other I couldn’t quite make out.  It was surprisingly weathered and hard to read, especially for being so new.  I brushed off the dirt with my finger and tried to decipher the last name.  Burton?  Bunton?   I decided it must be ‘Burton’, because it’s a much more common name.

With a sudden sense of horror, I felt the casket start to give way beneath me.  The display stand couldn’t hold the weight of both the casket and me, so it, with me on top of it, fell from the stand to the hard stone floor.  It fell in slow motion, however, so I had even more time to experience the horror.  I could hear her body jostling around inside the casket, bumping up against the sides.  With barely a sound, the casket landed on the floor, and I instantly got to my feet and set about making everything right.

I lifted up the casket, and as I was doing that, it tipped to the side and her cloth-wrapped body fell out onto the ground.  A string of expletives ran through my petrified mind as I reached down and gingerly picked up her remains, which were surprisingly small and lightweight, like those of a mummy.  My heart was racing and pounding in my chest as I placed the body back into the casket and somehow lifted the casket onto its stand.  I decided I should get out of there before one of the attendants found out what had happened.

That’s the point at which I woke up, my heart still racing and pounding.

This dream was interesting for a number of reasons.  I can’t help but wonder how many others have had similar dreams, about people they’ve never met yet still feel connected to, sometimes very strongly, by this ethereal online existence.  For the record, I chose not to reveal the identity of the Twitter friend in question, or to reveal the dream’s location, either, but it was definitely located in a specific city that is located east of where I live.  (Admittedly, that’s not giving much away, since I live on the West Coast.)  Also for the record, Catheryn Burton is not the name of anyone I know or have heard of in real life, but that’s really the name that was tagged on the coffin.

And now I’m going back to sleep, perchance to dream.

EDIT:  After I went back to sleep, I had a second dream, which I’ll tell in the same way.  I had bought a DVD called “Television’s Greatest Moments”, which was a compilation of the first moments that different celebrities appeared on TV.  I was very excited to watch it, so I took it to my friend’s wedding, and before the ceremony started, I popped it into a DVD player and sat down on the couch in front of a big-screen TV to watch it.  The first chapter on the DVD was episode one of Mork and Mindy, which was the first show that introduced the world to Robin Williams.   My friend the groom (who was black, by the way, and so was his wife-to-be) walked over to me just as the episode was starting and tapped me on the shoulder.  “What are you doing?  I want to introduce you to my fianceé.”  I grabbed the remote and hit the Pause button before I stood up and walked over with my friend, who introduced me.

“Are we friends?” she asked me.

“We are now,” I said, smiling and shaking her hand.

“What were you watching?” she asked.

I told her all about the DVD, and how it was the first time any of these now-famous actors had appeared on television, and how “frickin’ awesome” it was, and blah-blah.  Needless to say, she was less than impressed.  I told her it was great to have met her and then turned and walked over to the sofa, which I promptly plopped down upon to resume the episode of Mork & Mindy.  [Incidentally, I have the strange feeling that even though I haven’t watched that show since I was a little kid, my brain somehow managed to recreate the episode exactly the way it was.  I intend to investigate this at some point.]  Then the dream changed, and it was now as if I was part of the action of M&M, rather than watching it passively on TV.  There was a scene set in a train station in New York City, but the station was completely devoid of graffiti.  I took the opportunity to walk around and explore, since it this was a sort of time capsule of what NYC was like back in the 1970’s.  I walked up and down the street, marveling at just how clean everything was.

That’s when I woke up for the last time.