This morning's 8 a.m. Garageband creation. I was doing my morning coffee and frozen waffles and picked up the guitar to do The Passenger in a single track, as opposed to recording guitar and vocals separately. More of an in the moment sort of an approach. I'm thinking I need to start playing bigger venues than my kitchen table. I may need to get dressed first.
My voice keeps getting more loose, ruined, and expressive. Here's the reason I only got 2 hours sleep the night before the I-100 launch party. Picking up my guitar and opening Garageband at midnight is always a mistake, especially when I'm committed to being downtown at 6. Happily, I do well under pressure.
This morning Twin B asked about the writing she found on an index card. It said this.
Am F C G Am F C E
These were the chords from Iggy Pop's The Passenger. A friend and I played around with this several days before and I'd written them down to keep the complicated chord progression straight. It had been a rough week.
This struck me as what progressive educators sometimes call a teachable moment. I told her about how music is represented by letters, got out my guitar, and showed her how the same line repeated over and over with just one chord change at the end to make them a little different. She grabbed her African drum and started banging out a respectable rhythm and singing along.
"Try two hands," I advised. She nailed it. We rocked out while she sang along with me, totally going to town on the la-la-la-la-lalala-la's. Me and my five year old, at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning, sounding pretty good on a song by a sweating lunatic. Sweet.
"That was fun daddy," she glowed, "I'm going to be a musician!" I'll bet she is.
There's an awe inspiring version above, with the young 1977 Iggy glowing at around 10,000 watts. His class anger speech at the end is cool too. Wish I knew what he said.
Below is a photo of the girls and I eating strawberries at the Mercer Slough Nature Park today, where I learned that Lake Washington had once been lowered by 9 feet, that slough is pronounced "slew" and is a marshland connecting two bodies of water, and that there are bullfrogs there that eat mice, birds, and each other.
“Being is becoming,” and if we’re not “becoming,” we’re probably not doing much “being” either. This blog was started in a half-assed attempt at self-excavation. I have at least two unusual personality traits. The first is that I’m abnormally comfortable with ambiguity. I can happily muck about in the gray areas for years on end. This is probably why I love Seattle. The other is that I have a completely unrealistic belief in my own agency, which I tend to act upon. This blog has changed my life in more ways than I ever imagined. As my job as ED of a activist newspaper sold by homeless people, my vision for organizing, my thinking as a teacher, my history as a working-poor loser turned middle-class “advocate,” and my life as a parent swirled about me, this blog has been a path toward the center. We live in dangerous times, and the seductions to an easy, half-lived life of anesthetized materialism are all around. I have come to understand that my work is to be a revolutionary, both out in the world and within myself, turning over what is old, rotten, stale, and repressive, and building for a future where we can all find happiness and have the things we truly need.
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