beautiful, funny, sad & true

I had a funny dream the other day, in which I was out with a guy friend from real life and a girl and guy with whom he works.  We were at a pub drinking a bunch of beers, talking and laughing and all of a sudden the girl was talking about plumbing, and her faucet.  When she said the word ‘faucet’, I laughed and gestured toward my friend, “Or FLAUCET, as he used to say.”

By way of a snappy comeback, my friend pointed at me and told her, “Yeah, well one time HE said that he was gonna give me a hand job.”  Everybody laughed and I said, “I reMEMber that!  My sixth girlfriend and I used to joke about that all the time, so that’s why you weren’t surprised when that came flying out of my mouth.”

The girl turned to me and asked, “Sixth girlfriend, huh?”

I said, “Yup,” and then launched into a long, supremely boring story about her and me that even I wasn’t interested in listening to, so I cut it short and said, “What can I say?  I like shock value.”  My friend laughed a little, and then everyone went back to talking about whatever subjects we’d been talking about before, and continued to drink our beers.

* * * * *

Incidentally, my friend really did think the word was ‘flaucet.’  I don’t know why he thought that, and neither does he, but I’ve always found it amusing.  Also incidentally, my sixth girlfriend reads my blog, and she even has her own that’s listed in my blogroll.  But we certainly never joked around about hand jobs, nor have I ever offered (or wanted) to give my friend one, so I have no idea where that particular subplot came from.

Anyway.   All that’s neither here nor there.

I love accents, and I kinda always have.  I also love to learn how to mimic them, and I kinda always have.  When I was a kid, I used to think that someday I would grow out of this tendency, but so far it’s still with me, and thank gawd for that.  My favorite accents to do are two of the most difficult ones.  Liverpudlian (from Liverpool, England), otherwise known as the Beatles’ accent,  with its sing-songy inflections and cadences and hard G’s on the ends of words (like ‘everythinG’) took quite a while and many repeated viewings of A Hard Day’s Night in order to master it.

My newest favorite is Australian, which I could never figure out until I listened to a book on tape, and found to my eternal delight that since it was an Australian story, they used an Australian actor to read it.  Brilliant!  Finally I had the chance to really hone in on the details of the accent, and realized that it’s all in the vowels.  They change, halfway through, as you flatten out the back of your tongue.  In fact, the phrase ‘change halfway through’ is the phrase that I used to lapse into the accent, and it’s now the phrase I use to explain to people how to hear it.

I told you that story to tell you this one.  The other night, I had just gotten home from seeing Ponyo with LJ (we both were lukewarm about it; it’s meant more for kids than many of his others are) and my building mates were standing in the street talking as I parked my car.  They were going to the Sandy Hut, and they invited me to join them.  We jumped in Flutist’s car and off we went.  While there, Cellist and his girlfriend have a favorite video game they like to play, so when it was free, they got up to play, and that left Flutist and me by ourselves.

We were sitting and talking, when a girl walked up next to our table to look at the mural that’s on the wall.  (I find it hard to believe that multiple Internet searches were unable to find me a picture of said mural.)  It’s a collage of a bunch of caricatures of famous people from the past, like W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, people like that, and it’s fair to say that it does attract attention and start conversations.  So anyway, the girl.  She stood there looking at the mural, and asked us who this one particular person was supposed to be.  So we all started talking about that, and that’s when Flutist and I noticed that she had an Australian accent.  Turned out that she was traveling with two or three of her guy friends, and they found themselves in Portland for a day or so.  We talked about that, and Flutist has been to Australia a couple of times (has family there, in fact) and she told the girl that I do a great accent.  The girl actually wanted to introduce me to her friends, because it was the best accent she’d heard so far, and she thought it would be funny to make a new Aussie friend in a random bar in a random part of this crazy little city.  She asked how I did it, and I told her about the ‘halfway through’ thing, which Flutist is aware of too, because I’ve told her about it before.

After the discussion of accents (she also wanted to know how to improve her American), she started to tell me and Flutist about an idea for a comedy skit she’d been working on.  She explained it to us, and it was something about two guys who go outside to smoke, and something about getting ‘halfway through’ their cigarettes when hijinks suddenly ensue.  Flutist and I cracked up laughing every time she said ‘halfway through’ so we missed a little bit of what she was trying to tell us.  We did get the gist, however, and it was kind of funny, but she interpreted our outbursts as if we were laughing at the actual joke, so she asked, “So you guys thought it was that funny?  You think it could really go somewhere?”  With a healthy dose of diplomacy, we told her that it was pretty funny, but what actually sent us into hysterics was the fact that she said ‘halfway through’ about four times, and Flutist knows that’s my Australian catch phrase, so to be sitting next to a cute Australian girl who was using that exact phrase was just too perfect.

After about fifteen more minutes, her friends whisked her away and they all left to go elsewhere.  Flutist and I filled in Cellist and his girlfriend, who had returned to our table during the telling of the joke, on the back story and the significance of of the coincidental phrase, and Flutist added, to me, “You charmed the pants off her.”  “I’ve got my moments,” I replied through a wry smile.

The young kid in me, who loved accents but always thought that he would eventually grow out of all this nonsense, was overjoyed and felt completely vindicated by the whole experience.  Funny how life works sometimes.

I just watched this documentary called The Cruise about Tim ‘Speed’ Levitch, who you may know from his animated appearance in the movie Waking Life.

Here’s a clip from one of my favorite scenes of The Cruise, which I can’t embed, unfortunately, but it’s well worth your time to watch it.

Neil Finn is a genius.  If you weren’t already aware of that, go seek out his albums from his time as the leader of Crowded House, as well as his two solo albums.  I can’t recommend them highly enough.

He’s also a consummate performer (his concert in 2001 was one of the best and most memorable I’ve ever seen to this day) and a very genuine person as well.  In fact, the word ‘truth’ appears in more of his songs than any other word I can think of.  Important words, I mean, not like ‘the’ or something.  You know what I’m saying.  Anyway, here’s an interview I came across that really captures his spirit well, I think.  It’s from a dopey Australian comedy show, and the host plays him a dopey song that he’s been working on, and he asks for Neil’s opinion and some advice on how to improve it.  The ‘money shots’, at least for my money, are of the slightly uncomfortable look on Neil’s face as he’s listening and trying to figure out what in the world to say.  But the bits about ‘being in the moment’ are just so dead-on and earnest.  It just shows how real, how funny, and how intelligent (not to mention talented) Neil is, even in a ludicrous setting like this.  He appears about two minutes into this clip, so you can feel free to snooze through the rest of it until then.

In a more serious mini-documentary/interview called “A Good Tune Is Always In Short Supply,” he goes into great detail about his process of songwriting, and even lets us in on his secret formula.  I’ll post Part One here, and if you’re interested, Part Two is easy enough to come by.

I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story in the long string of heart-warming online tales that illustrates the power of the internet to connect people who have been estranged for decades.  It also illustrates the power of music, and the power of a certain kind of mental pathology, too.  You’ll see what I mean.

One of my cohorts from Iron Horse received an out-of-the-blue message on Facebook yesterday, at 1:30 in the morning, from someone he didn’t know, that said, “Are you [misspelled his last name] from [our high school]?  I remember you; we wrote a song in detention.’  He named the song, and correctly wrote out the chorus.  No, I’m not going to quote it here, because then it would be searchable, but he totally nailed it.

His profile was private, there was no picture, and he had a very unusual first name, but my friend didn’t recognize him in any way.  He had eleven online friends, all of whom shared his surname.  My friend responded, “Yeah, that was me.  I kinda remember writing that in detention. . .I changed the lyrics around, and my old band used to play that song.  Do you have a picture or something to jump-start my memory?  What years were you at [our high school]?”

The guy wrote back that he moved away from Yakima in 1987, and that he’s living in California now.  He’s of a certain nationality, and “try to get sum pic’s.”  (I took the liberty of cleaning up his grammar and punctuation before, but it was all typed lower-case, with slightly awkward punctuation.)  My friend accepted his friend request, and we’ll see where the story goes from here.  The two of us can’t help but wonder what the guy’s life is like, since he’s writing to someone he met only one time, in high school detention, twenty two years ago (!), and seems to be hoping to rekindle a friendship where it left off.   I mean, sure,  my friend is a great guy, and we were a pretty good band, but this guy doesn’t even know about the band, because he left town before my friend and I even started it.  Oh, AND.  I should mention that my friend was neither a miscreant nor a ne’er-do-well (I love those two terms, and I love it when I get the opportunity to use them), he was only in detention that one day, and never saw this guy ever again.  He’s not anyone I knew, either then or now, but I haven’t been able to find my yearbooks to investigate him.

Incidentally, speaking of the band, the community access TV station still plays our videos to this day, which completely mystifies my friend and me.  These are not new videos I’m referring to, either.  They were filmed and originally aired during that same time period, from 1987 to ’89, which is when the band was in existence.   We were just a bunch of high school kids, playing some songs that we wrote ourselves, and I can’t imagine why anyone watching now would even enjoy the songs these days, let alone find a bunch of kids from twenty years ago compelling.

Be all that as at may, I admit that it’s gratifying (in a weird way) that they do still play that stuff.  We had a good time making the videos, and like I said, we were a pretty decent band, but we had no delusions about our abilities or chances for stardom, either.  We were just a bunch of kids who had a band, like a million other kids in a million other bands.

Just for fun, here’s a picture from our very first show.  In fact, it could well be of the song in question, too, because I just now remembered that I actually sang the whole second verse of it (and I didn’t sing lead very often), so it seems very likely that this picture was taken during that song.

I just love the oversize mirrored sunglasses, and you can see that I was working hard on Mullet Number One as well.  Gee, I wonder if this was the 80’s?

Meanwhile, back to the topic at hand.

In the interest of full disclosure, and the interest of fairness to this guy, I’ve spent the better part of this month reconnecting with friends from years ago, one of whom had also been twenty years ago (she reads this blog, too, by the way), and it’s been really great for everyone involved.  You probably already knew that if you’re reading this, though, since I’ve written a bit about it lately.  More than once but fewer than three times, in fact, just in case you were counting.   So I have no business knocking the guy for trying.  As human beings, we all are basically social animals (some of us more than others) who are looking for connections wherever we can find them.  But the people I’m talking with are people with whom I had actual relationships and friendships.  They’re based on more than just a one-time meeting, in detention, more than half a lifetime ago.

The title of this entry, incidentally, comes from a book that our high school’s choir director had on the bookshelf in his office, and it seemed apropos to use it here.  Iron Horse shortened it to ‘Mental Game’ and we used it as the title of our album.  I mean cassette.  Oh, how dearly I wish I had a copy of that.  I have a lot of old videos, and tapes, and pictures, and notebooks, but I’m not sure I have that cassette cover floating around anywhere.  I’ll have to do some digging.

I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds.