It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

And I Suppose You Want To Go Practice?!

17 July, 2016

So, like I don’t have enough to do, I bought one of these:

It is a Yamaha P115 digital piano, with a graduated weighted action that is meant to make it feel like the real thing. I have a real piano back in Philadelphia (a six-foot Weber grand my father bought in White Plains, NY before I was born), but it did not make the trip over here to Brno for obvious reasons. Fortunately the people renting our house there actually play, so at least someone is using it…

Anyway, I digress. Why, a reasonable person might ask, would I go out and buy a piano to practice, when I already have a perfectly good vibraphone sitting right here that would happily absorb any practicing I could throw at it?

Here it is, looking a bit surly like a jilted lover…

Bogus reasons for buying the piano are:

The piano can be practiced with headphones on so as not to wake up my spouse early in the morning. This is actually a real concern since morning is the only time I can get my shit together to practice, but my poor wife would gladly suffer the noise if it meant I was actually practicing the thing. So, not a real reason.
Taking a vibe to jams is a serious pain in the neck, but people are happy to let you sit in on a piano. Also sort of true, but again, if I really wanted to play out on the vibe, I would figure out a way to make it work.
Piano skills are more versatile. Also probably true, but this isn’t the real reason either.

The real reason: The piano and I have unfinished business with each other.

It will come as a shock to those of you who know the disciplined, driven, regimented person I am today, but when I was a child I had no self-discipline whatsoever.

Heh.

No the second part really is true. I liked the piano, I enjoyed playing it, I loved to play it for other people and make them happy. I just would not ever make myself sit down and practice the thing. It’s funny because then, as now, I don’t mind practicing at all. As a kid, though, I simply refused to get around to doing it. There was always something else to get in the way. So, even though I must have had nine years of lessons starting from age 6, I never got very good at piano. Weirdly, I did go to a proper conservatory and major in music performance — but it was in percussion, which I did not take up until I was 16. Hence the vibraphone.

So, years went by. I wound up with my father’s piano because somehow my mother got it in their divorce settlement, and I periodically went through bouts of “Hey let’s learn to play jazz on this thing, why not?” which then inevitably tapered off. Readers will be forgiven for thinking hey isn’t this just another one of those cycles?

Well, I am determined to prove you all wrong. It’s all about this unfinished business, you see. When I was young, and I had all the time in the world to practice, I squandered that time and failed to achieve something that I have really always wanted to achieve, from the first day I saw my father sight-read Scott Joplin rags out of the big book he had. So now, when I have no time at all, but maybe a bit more self awareness, I have decided to give it another serious go. My deal with myself, before I bought the instrument that is staring me as I write this, was that I would only allow myself to have it if I practice it every day. Meaning, every single day — at least every day I am not traveling. (This is a fairly big loophole that I’m not quite sure how to close and will probably have to live with.) Every day is going to mean getting up earlier in the morning and forcing myself to sit down on that bench and really, actually learn how to play. I mean, play well enough that I can hang on the bandstand with a real jazz combo, which is serious business. Every day is going to mean being careful to go to bed earlier so that I’m awake and alert when I get up to practice. But, every day also means that you progress like a rocket compared to how long it used to take me to learn anything practicing for an hour the morning of my lesson (only).

I’ll let you all know how it goes…

An awesome Czech saying

12 January, 2016

I just learned a Czech saying that I love:

“Co sis navařil, to si taky sněz”

Which means, roughly, “What you have cooked, you also must eat.”

I learned this when I asked a friend of mine, Jaromir Coufal, if the phrase he had used in passing, “They are eating the soup we cooked,” was a Czech phrase.

I have begun calling Jaromir “Djarda” because everyone outside of Europe mispronounces his nickname “Jarda” (“Yarda” in English) as “dŽarda” (“Jarda” in English). This is a running joke in our office in Brno.

We also have multiple Jans and Jirkas. You can imagine.

Back to Old Europe

30 December, 2015

Kim and I are wrapping up our whirlwind tour of America today, waiting to board our flight back to Vienna and then the train to our lovely Brno. Hopefully the fog will have lifted…

Here is the obelisk that stands behind the Brno cathedral Petrov. This photo makes me sad because it is going to encourage my friends and relatives to think that Brno is like Transylvania or something, which it most certainly is not. At least I assume it is not, never having been to Transylvania myself. The point is that Frankenstein’s Monster is not about to lurch hungrily out of the fog at you, despite appearances to the contrary…

Everyone says the fog, is pretty unusual for Brno. Hopefully it ends soon.

While in California, we visited my family, which resulted in this:

Mom, in the middle front, was recently diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a kind of bone marrow cancer. Fortunately she has been responding well to the treatment and everyone seems optimistic about her prognosis, which is a real relief. My grandfather — Dad’s father — died of the same disease back in 1985. Anyway we thought it would be a good idea to try to get all of us together for Christmas, which was made possible by many many pounds of jet fuel and (on Kim and my part) many thousands of Air Miles. It was a really good visit, and exactly the right length (6 days).

We stopped in Philadelphia on the way home and saw a few folks and fixed a few things at our house there. It is always nice to see all our old friends. Kim and I are both surprised I think that, as much as we love the city, we don’t really miss it. I guess 20 years in one place may be long enough, or at least long enough that it is time to take a break.

Also, I really like not having to fix anything in our Brno apartment. Having a landlord is great!

Everything’s Bigger in America

24 December, 2015

Today I’m writing from a coffee shop in the Santana Row “village” (see below for rant) in San Jose, California. It’s Christmas Eve, 2015. I’ve been in the Czech Republic now with only brief interruptions since June 2015, so I’ve had a fair bit of time to acclimate to the European lifestyle. Coming back for the holiday brings a bunch of thoughts, including how weird it is that everyone understands English, but one stands out:

Holy crap everything is just enormous!

Like, seriously huge. Cars, houses, roads, plates of food, stores, things in stores… I feel like Gulliver or something. Only the people are roughly the same size. Well, they’re roughly the same height, anyway. Nonetheless, it apparently takes one of these to transport a family of four to dinner:

It’s not like big cars are a new thing in the U.S. After all, my father drove us around in one of these when I was a kid:

(Wow I really wish he had kept that car…)

What I do think has changed since the Johnson administration is the size of everything else. I’m not sure, but I wonder sometimes if the American obesity crisis is simply an attempt to expand to fill all the space we’ve made for ourselves. (Really I think it’s because we’re being poisoned, but that’s a subject for another blog.)

The contrast with Brno, where the average monthly salary would not quite buy the gas for the truck above, is quite impressive. You can make arguments for both lifestyles, I guess, but I know which I would prefer.

Oh, and about Santana Row… blearrgh. Why do we tear down real towns with character and interest, so we can build fake ones instead? Not enough room for luxury retail? Bad land-use laws (this is probably it, really)? I think I feel another blog coming on on the importance of decent legislation…

My God, What Have I Done

23 December, 2015

So my crazy nephew Elliot Brock has decided it is imperative that he host his own 4chan server RIGHT NOW.

4chan? Seriously? But, I’m supposed to be his hip nerdy uncle, so I’m all, sure, I have a spare Linode that isn’t doing much, you can use it if you want. The catch is you have to learn enough emacs that you can sysadmin the thing yourself, because there is no way I’m waking up late at night to fix it when it breaks.

Yes, I am making a young person learn emacs. Call me evil, if you want…

Anyway, got a web root set up for him, he’s taking to emacs quite well for a 14-year-old with a post-millenial attention span, so far so good. (Is it possible to have a negative attention span, actually?) The point of the exercise is of course for him to actually learn something about networking, linux system administration, etc. And to create another emacs user because otherwise vim will get him, and that will be the end of that. Groan.