the problem with binoculars

You've seen it.  You know exactly what I'm talking about.  

You're sitting down with a friend and you notice that they are not really paying attention to what you're saying.  "mhmm."  they say.  Some how you can't ever get them to listen to you. 

 They're just not there.  It's like they're focused on something completely different than the words coming out of your mouth.

 

Or there's the relationship you're in.  "When we're _____ (fill in the blank), then we'll be happy".  At some point in the future you'll be happy the only problem with that being that you're not happy currently.

Maybe it's your career.  "Ok, well right now I'm working a job I hate but in a couple years I'll get a promotion to a job I hate less".  

"I can't do that!  What if I fail!"  What if....

Everyone has glasses ...even if they have 20/20 vision.  Some people call this a world view.  I call it survival.

Just to get through life we pick up pairs of glasses.  We have bifocals for comparing the past and present and special glasses so that you can examine your current life situation more accurately with precision and wisdom.  You may have even heard of seeing life through rose-colored glasses...same thing.

The only problem with this is that we sometimes forget to take the glasses off and we keep piling them on the end of our nose until we have some sort of weird twisted binoculars teetering back and forth on our faces.  And this isn't just uncomfortable.  It's bad.  Really bad.  

When you're looking through binoculars all the time, you only really see a small portion of the scenery far away.  We begin to make judgements about our current lives based on the narrow perspective of what may or may not be our future.  

Maybe you've met someone like this - who can only think about the future and forgets to live their present.  Musicians have a an acutely difficult time avoiding this.  They want to succeed so much that they forget to enjoy music.  

The problem with binoculars is that you trip a lot more when you wear them.  Glasses are fine... but let's save ourselves from some serious pain and keep it to one pair.  

blisters

Blisters...stupid blisters

People always say that mistakes help you to learn or struggle makes you stronger.  I have a 

question for all of those people...when?

I recently had a voyage, and I call it a voyage mostly because the length was longer than I was expecting.  Yes, it was a voyage and one that I was insufficiently prepared for.  I brought no jacket and I wore high heels.  

It all started like this:  I was born... and twenty five years later my friends decided to buy me a drink to celebrate the event.  "How wonderful!", you might think or "What wonderful friends!".  I would not argue with you at this point of the story nor would I blame the outcome on these two lovely individuals.  

We decided to walk and we also decided to take the pretty way, which always means longer. Early on in my epic adventure my friend said, "Do you need to change your shoes?".

"No", I said, "these shoes are miraculous.  I could wear them all day."

My pompous claims soon came tumbling down and I began to feel an extraordinarily sower pain in my right heal...then my left.  

If at this point I had said something to my friends they would have insisted that we turn around and go back but I could hardly be expected to admit that I was a fool and did not in fact have miracle shoes.  Repentance fails to be one of my strengths.  

So my unseen blisters grew and grew and my pride fell.  

I now sit with flip flops on, having worn them for the last three days despite the 30 degree weather, simply because I could not fit shoes over my circular shame tattoos.  

This reminds me of my own life experience.  I often talk up my own choices (like choosing a thankless and penniless career) only to recognize that other people's choices are valid too.  I love taking the pretty way but my vanity often inhibits my enjoyment.  

So I have blisters.  I've made a ton of stupid mistakes but I feel more weak than strong.  Yes, weak in the light of self-understanding.  When does the blister heal?  When do you become stronger because of your poor choices or your failure to see passed your own experience?

I suppose I have learned one thing.  If you have a long way to go...leave your vanity behind.  You'll be better off without it.

Candles in the middle of the day

Why do you have candles lit in the middle of the day?

Are you nuts?

  

Or possibly just a self-employed musician with writer's block.  

People always ask me if I get writer's block.  I'm often tempted to glaring at them with one of those long open-mouthed stares.  

"Are you kidding me?!"  

"When do I not have writer's block?"  

Truly, with every single song or idea, even the ones that appear to be genius and possibly flawless, I've found that within days or even hours my once brilliant lightbulb will have shorted out and I'm left in darkness to figure out if the bulb was faulty or whether I simply tripped on the cord.  Yes, groping in the dark for an easy solution or for something that's broken and useless.

This is my process:

sitting down on the couch, in traffic, waiting for the train ;) , playing scrabble, running and it hits me.  Bam!  Maybe a line or a melody or even just a concept.  

I stop whatever I'm doing and feverishly try to find something to write it down on - a paper, receipt, my hand, or just miming the words in the air.  Anything to preserve my rare moments of unfiltered muse.  I go back to what I was doing with ease knowing that the following day I will return to complete my idea.  

The beginning always comes easy but then you have to give the song a structure and a progression as well as making it bad-ass and on top of that it has to be original.   This is the point in the process when you might happen upon an artist or writer or musician who is blankly starring at a white piece of paper with remnants of every junk food snack scattered in a circle around them and numerous used coffee mugs stacked on each other.  

Good intentions don't last long especially with every other activity you have going on.  Priorities are difficult to keep straight.  So at this point avoidance kicks in with gusto.  But avoidance can be one of an artist's greatest strengths.  If you try with everything else going on to stay away from your project but still end up having dreams about it or seeing it in the last bits of ketchup on your plate, it probably means that it's a good idea.  

So now comes the real crunch.  You've realized that your idea has potential - real potential - so you make a pot of coffee, you lock yourself in a room, and most likely lose a few useful parts of your brain having to do with social skills until you emerge victorious or at least close enough. 

So why do you have candles lit in the middle of the day?

I'm at the avoidance stage just trying to shed a little light on my malfunctioning lightbulb. And when I tell you I have new song to play for you...you'll be thankful I'm such a weirdo.

by the train

Most people find their muse in a person or a in a beautiful setting.  Maybe they are inspired by poetry or riding their bike.  For me...it's the Baltimore Light Rail.

Being from Annapolis, Maryland, the former Capital of the US and a small town in it's own right, the wonders of public transportation rarely found their way into my daily commute. 

Here everyone gets out their bike or their golf cart or their beamer or their boat to get where they need to go.  Some might argue that the Annapolitan's preference of private transportation has forever handicapped its ability to develop a reliable public system.  Chicken or the Egg - the situation is just bad.

After college I started working in Baltimore and decided that instead of paying for parking, which no Annapolis native will do in their right mind, I would take the Baltimore Light Rail into work.  So early each morning I would rise and go to Cromwell station to wait for the good old four car white stallion.  And every morning it would squeak in, rattling,  as if every bolt needed to be screw down and sodded. 

 

This hunk of metal was anything but faithful.  The power would go out at random and we would be stuck squirming in our seats (if you had a seat) for up to an hour.  The electric power lines would freeze and break on the coldest day of the year leaving hundreds of commuters out in the cold swearing just to keep their lips moving or a shooting on the north end of the track would shut down the rail entirely.  

Needless to say I got used to waiting and it was in this seemingly frustrating time of my day that I began to write.  It was here, at the convergence of every kind of humanity (poor or rich, snobby or kind, homeless and helpless) that music started to flow from my spirit into physical being.  

You see, waiting, though aggravating and inconvenient, provides us with a much needed pause, a rest, a break, to breath and observe.  It requires us to stop and just be (provided we don't have our iphones).  And this space gives us room to grow.

It was on the Baltimore Light Rail that I began my love affair with writing - a place to observe humanity and understand my own - but more so a place to slow myself down and truly see beauty everywhere even on the Light Rail.

late nights with friends

How often do you stay up late with friends?

But not the kind of late where you're out "towning" it up.  Rather the kind of late where you're on the cusp of something wonderful and you know it. 

Last night I stayed up late with two extraordinary people my friends Winship (you won't forget that name easily) and Lacey who conveniently are Married.  Both are artists and at the beginning of long and wonderful careers.

Lacey is an up and coming fashion designer doing some creative alterations and 

whose new line of spring skirts will be sold at shine boutiques in Baltimore.  She has this stirring vision for women's apparel. Check out her stuff at www.kalivoda.com

You'll kick yourself if you don't.

Winship is a multi talented musician, former member of Kentavious, and future record producer.  In an era when the information highway clogs your conscious with a lot of the unexceptional, Winship is the real deal...true talent...pure motives...bad ass music.

(this is just a great picture.)

So yesterday we expected to have a short meeting where Winship and I jammed and Lacey and I chatted about dresses yet we spent over 9 hours together talking candidly about art and the struggle involved in validating your life's work to the world.

How often do artists die before they are recognized as talented or even genius?  What's wrong with us?  Why can't we see it while people are here with us?  Artist after artist, musician after musician sacrifice any kind of comfort in life because THEY know their art is worth it.  

Just the other day a customer at a local coffee shop who I had started a conversation with told me that I was wasting my liberal arts degree.  My liberal arts degree...in Music performance...

Maybe it's really that I'm being wasted, that value has been skewed and our culture has made it necessary for people to work jobs they hate that distract them from what they were made to do.

Let's change.  Support Art!  And next time you stay up late with friends listen to some music, create, and open doors.

When do we wake up?

Devil's Got a Pretty Face

Here is a video taken at the last Rams Head show.

It features the incredible talents of Care Nebbia, my lovely sister, and Tim Cefaratti, our fearless drummer.

Shot with my big brother's digital camera, you may notice someone saying, "Oh girl!", in the background.

I think this adds to the feel of the piece.

Where they meet

There certainly is a lot of confusion here.  And by here I mean earth.  You know...that big green thing that races around the sun.  Sometimes I feel that all this turning gives us vertigo and our whole lives are spent trying not to bash into each other.

inevitably we do.

I recently heard this incredible piece on NPR (yes I am advertising for them - shamelessly trying to get on the radio in whatever way possible) about a philosophical monk.  Whenever I hear the word monk on the radio I get excited or at least curious.  What monk...yeah monk...goes on the radio?  Visions toss in my head of Sister Wendy with her habit and oversized glasses.   It's gonna be really funny or I'm going to have to pull off to the side of the road to wipe the mascara off my now drenched face.

It was the latter.  

This monk, whose name I now forget, described our human situation as the place where the invisible meets the physical.  So essentially what makes us human is our souls being connected to our bodies and our bodies being thus connected to our souls (insert sobs).  Invisible touches physical.

Then I thought, this in a way is true of music as well.  Music, the truest kind, the real stuff that actually moves us, that touches our invisible, is in fact the place where divine understanding meets human confusion.  

So essentially we know that we were meant to live better lives.  We know that life is unfair but we don't understand why it is the way it is and why things happen the way they do.  Music expresses these and without words.  It is a cry of sorrow for what we should be but have lost without knowing why.

No matter how I squint

“Sunset is an angel weeping, holding out a bloody sword.  No matter how I squint I can not make out what it’s pointing toward.”  -Bruce Cockburn

 

Years ago I was on one of my raids through my brother Eric’s album collection.  Many of his albums have disappeared this way and despite the fact that I have now extended this addiction to books and dishes or his ideas of general genius he has never once asked for one back.  Maybe my debt will soon be called up.  Hopefully he will not read this entry. 

 

Getting back to the story…years ago I was on one of my traditional raids when I came across a record that Eric had introduced to me once before.  It, all decorated in strange 90’s sparkle, was The Charity of Night by Bruce Cockburn.  I know initially I had made some sort of face with my tongue sticking out but after my second discovery, after popping open the plastic paradise, it quickly became part of my life soundtrack.

 

Unlike the larger majority of artists in the popular scene of music, Cockburn’s work extends beyond music and cd sales, beyond touring and his fan base.  He has dedicated his life to creating honest and stirring art that not only speaks of the human experience but advocates for the impoverished and manipulated among us.

 

As a musician and a person seeking deeper explanations of what we see here on earth but often do not understand, I found great nourishment and reassurance in the words and poignant melodies of Cockburn.

 

His song “Pacing the Cage” is the inspiration for this sight.  His career is an inspiration to my own.  “No matter how I squint I cannot make out what it’s pointing toward”.

 

-val