One of the best parts of doing one of JC's programs is the sudden appearance of synchronicity. It's not that the synchronicity has suddenly appeared, it's that you've just begun to recognize it. The general idea follows that if you want something, you put your request "out there" and step forward, and what you need naturally steps toward you. The words are printed in gold letters above my desk at Wishville: Jump, and a net will appear. Or as JC says, "Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can."
This morning while writing at the place I spend most mornings, the Grand Central Baking Company, who by the way does not even pretend to sell bagels, I started musing on whether or not it was synchronicity that I'm having a dastardly hard time selling my piano.
Cause maybe I'm supposed to be playing it.
Over the past couple of months my creative desire to indulge in art forms outside of my "native" territory of words and photographs has begun to grow like an excited little wave inside of me. My whole life I have wanted to play bass in a Go-Go's cover band. And lately I have been downloading and examining the tabs for Cyndi Lauper songs. I absolutely worship Cyndi. The first concert I ever went to and one of my closet obsessions, right up there with Crowded House. (There's not really much else from the 80's I'd have a desire to retain.)
There was the Go-Go's cover band, and then I got the idea about two years ago that I wanted to play in an oldies cover band, but play punk rock versions of the songs. It would be an all girl band called "Ex-Girl Collection" and we'd play hard fast versions of "Runaway", "Earth Angel", and "Why Do Fools Fall In Love". Cause I think there is a lot of anger and built up rage in those types of songs that actually give them an eerie calm on the surface, and they'd really come to life at the hands of more energy, distortion and bar chords. Like listening to the Beach Boys Pet Sounds and realizing how sad and heavy it really is underneath the bright arrangements. Plus songs from the 50's and 60's are all under three minutes -- perfect for a punk translation.
It's largely my Dad's fault. I grew up in a house where music was important, and my Dad's record collection was to die for. Hundreds of original 45's, their vinyl protected in original sleeves. We listen to oldies day and night. We even went to Cruise Night in the summer, when all the folks with restored classic cars drove them out and parked them in a giant lot and went around drooling on each other's '57 Chevy convertibles, or the hard-tops with the upside record player on the ceiling.
I listen to the oldies station a ton, and I would listen to it more if it wasn't littered with obnoxious commercials. KEXP and NPR have spoiled me. My Dad gave me a chunk of his record collection, but I don't have a record player.
So the other night I had this dream, a deep colorful dream with a plot, character arcs, and a soundtrack. Toward the end of it, I was in Ex-Girl Collection and I was writing new songs, punk songs, that sounded like oldies. But it wasn't the kind of dream where I'm standing on stage in front of a million screaming fans. The part that I remember was just me sitting alone, writing music in my studio with the black Rickenbacker I learned to play on when I was 17. I was talking to someone about it quietly -- I don't remember who. It was a serene and lucid dream. I woke up sad that it wasn't real.
I was thinking about the music writing, and my recently reignited interest in drawing. Two things I've enjoyed since I was little. The drawing interests me especially now because I want my daily journal to be multimedia -- I want to be able to sketch my day, or draw the perfect stargazer lily that bloomed yesterday. I took a drawing class several years ago at the Cambridge Center for Adult Ed. It was fun, but not the kind of drawing I was interested in -- it was fruit bowls and bottles and stacks of old books. They had a cafe drawing class that I really wanted to take, but it was never offered at a reasonable time. It was a colored-pencil drawing class, and everyone would go to the cafe and get a cup of coffee and draw what they saw from their seat. That's the kind of stuff I could get into.
In a way, I think I was so attracted to photography because it allowed me to catalog my experience with little skill needed that I didn't already possess. My impulsive, impatient nature doesn't have the learned discipline to practice daily and get slowly good at something. If I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, I get frustrated and move on to something else. I'm like a four-year-old that way. But it's how I create. I'm hoping I can locate a balance between needing to be instantly perfect at something and spending a little bit of time honing my skill.
So about selling the piano. I haven't been playing as much as I'd like to. Because the walls at the loft are very thin and I have performance anxiety and don't care to have the concert classical guitarist upstairs listen to me fumble clumsily through the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which is the piece I got the piano to learn to play. I shouldn't care, but I'm very aware of it. It ruins my session. When I'm there late at night, I play because there's no one else in the building. So the piano has largely become a source of guilt for me and I'm sick of looking at it and feeling badly for not practicing. That's why I want to sell it. I've been trying for over a month, but I keep getting response after response that falls through.
And strangely, I sold my book of Beethoven's Fantasies (which includes the Moonlight sonata) last week on Amazon, and the people said that wasn't the book they wanted and sent it back to me. Maybe I should hang on to this for a little longer and see what happens.
Back to my "native" art forms. I was thinking about how music has never been "mine" -- as a fan, yes, as a music writer, yes. But making music has never felt like it belonged to me -- even though I've recently written pieces for the piano and composed a bit when I was younger. I started playing guitar because it was easier to do in a group -- when everyone was hanging out and playing together, there wasn't always a piano handy. After awhile, I felt like "why bother?" because there were so many talented people around me that were a million times better than I, and it wasn't "my thing" anyway. My thing was writing. My thing was hiding behind a camera. I was always an observer, never a performer. And it didn't help that friends would hear my fledgling attempts to figure out a song and then they would whip it out perfectly, nonchalantly, the next time they saw me. I felt like it was a personal attack intended to keep me in my place. Which may very well be a warped view. But it felt very real to me and has remained one of my biggest creative blocks involving music.
When your closest friends are mostly musicians and your job is to be their cheerleader, sometimes they're too busy promoting their art to even acknowledge yours. It's a dilemma between the performer and the observer. One forgets they're not always on stage, and the other denies that they ever are.
The piano feels more natural to me than many of my other art forms when I'm playing. I almost instantly go into a trance-like state of Zen, my head shutting off like I can never seem to make it do in meditation. I've been playing since I was six, so I was playing before I was writing. Too bad the hulking instrument is not as portable as a one-subject notebook. I may have clocked more hours over the years.
My recent fascination with piano tuning & teching is so typical of me. I know I want to make music, but I haven't given myself permission to, so instead I'll spend all my energy making the instrument work better for someone else to play. I'll let myself in the bakery, but I'm not allowed to eat any cake. I can pick up the baseball bat, but I'm not supposed to hit any balls. Just shine up the bat for the next person who is a real player. Not an imposter, like me.
Although the piano is right now taking up the wall where I was going to start painting, perhaps I can acquire an old collapsible easel and coexist with it for a little while. Maybe I could even learn to play without caring that others could hear I was not perfect -- not even close. Maybe composing that piece that's been fluttering around in my head for weeks will help me break the decade-long creative block around music. Maybe I could let that piano stay at Wishville and make it my thing.
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