Carmen Danenberg (c. 1999)

As some of you know, my paternal grandmother passed away Thursday, February 21st at the age of 92.  This was just days before a planned family get together, so my father and aunt were able to be at her side.  Her health had been failing for several years, so my father had moved her from Florida to a home in Cheshire a while back to take better care of her.  It was nice to be able to see her whenever I was in town for the weekend.  That’s something we didn’t really have growing up, with relatives scattered all over the world.

Except for a short while when we all lived in St. Thomas, visits to see my grandparents were infrequent trips to Florida.  In grade school, this meant a trip to Disney World every two years or so.  And while we were always excited about the Magic Kingdom, these are a few of the memories that are more important to me now:

• Their houses filled with vintage Chinese furniture and artwork, Peruvian pottery, and that giant clay lamp that looked like a meteorite.
• My grandmother’s Chinese cooking and coconut pudding with prune sauce that she made in her tiny kitchen with over 50 rooster and chicken decorations.
• Playing Rummikub and Mahjong with my grandparents.
• Their kind of pissy poodle.
• Listening to old Brazilian records in the bedroom
• The heat as soon as we got out of the airport in Tampa, and the soft chlorinated water that never seemed to get the soap off.
• Lots of old pictures, the kinds with the wavy edges, and letters from Hong Kong from the 30’s and 40’s.
• Lizards!
• Everybody speaking Portuguese in the room.
• My grandparents speaking Cantonese with each other so that nobody else would understand.
• The time they visited and my grandfather bit my grandmother’s thumb in his sleep.
• My grandfather cursing "Jackass!" in his Hong Kong British accent and waving his fist at other drivers from his blue Toyota Cressida.
• My grandmother’s sense of humor and my grandfather’s improvised war stories.

My Grandparents Roy and Carmen (c. 1941)

I flew down last Tuesday for Wednesday’s funeral.  One of her longtime friends hosted a fancy lunch.  Then we headed to the cemetary where she was laid to rest by my grandfather in a tiny service.

Some people I know grew up next door to their grandparents.  I kinda wish we had the same thing.

This is how I label my leftovers. I encourage you to do the same.

PS: This is not really vacuum-packed fried chicken.

I picked myself up a nice affordable laser printer today in the Lexmark E250dn.  It’s got the two features I wanted most: a network port and a built-in duplexing.  Since the printer can sit on the network, I can reclaim the PC I’ve been using as a print server and use it as a test platform for other projects.  Duplexing is a real nice paper saver when I need to print manuals and such.  I also appreciated that you can replace the toner and photoconductor separately, which is less wasteful.  And, unlike some others in the price range, it reportedly works "perfectly" with Linux.  (I’ll get around to testing that later…)

I haven’t printed much so far.  Installation was flawless.  There was a slight problem that the printer was faintly creasing the printed paper.  However, I was able to isolate the offending roller, and with a little "thumb maintenance", I corrected the defect.

Well, I hope it lasts a while!

Upon an enthusiastic recommendation, I attended Barry Harris‘ weekly jazz workshop last night.  Barry is a legendary jazz pianist and fervent jazz educator who, at the age of 78, hosts a workshop every Tuesday night for musicians of all levels.  That is to say, beginners are welcome, but he goes through stuff fast and it’s kind of funny when he snaps, "What’s so hard about that?  Play it right!"

Barry took us through the scales to play over "Whispering", the basis for the bebop standard "Groovin’ High".  Measure by measure, he drilled us in eighth-note scales counted off at around 160 bpm:

"Everybody play D7 up and down, one, two, three, four…  [play]   Again!  [play]  Down and up!  [play]  Up and down!  [play]  Now flat the second and the sixth, one, two, three, four…"

Then he’d stop and point out that we’d just changed our D7 scale into a G harmonic minor scale, and then sing some lines for us to play to connect the changes together.

I kept up with about 90% of it.  There was one long line he sung leading into the second half turnaround that was just too many notes for me to process at once, and breaking it apart became a lost cause once the whole room started noodling trying to figure it out.

Working through the song led us on a few tangents, one of them being what David Baker refers to as "bebop scales", but Barry refers to as making the scale "right".  I happened to start working on these heavily within the last month or so, and it’s really improving the flow of my phrases.  I’m not crazy about all the "rules" that go into where to put half steps and when, but I realize that I’m learning bebop and these are merely conventions to get that idiomatic sound.  But what really got me excited was that Barry said they didn’t need to be half steps…they could be "any random note"!  And he had us play G7 descending from the root, first with a half step between the root and seventh, then jumping up to the third between the root and seventh.  Awesome!

To further illustrate this, he had us play C major scales, inserting a half step between every tone.  Where there wasn’t room for a half step, he had us approach the note from a whole step above.  He went around the room making us play ascending from different scale tones.  I got to play from the sixth:

Then he had three of us play from different steps simultaneously.  The harmony sounded pretty cool.  There’s some potential in jazz arranging here, I think…

I learned a lot in two hours.  Even the stuff that I already knew, like G harmonic minor over D7, was worth learning again.  I always approached this as playing the harmonic minor of the target key.  Barry showed us that flatting the second and the sixth yields the related harmonic minor.  I always tell people, the more ways you learn to think of the same concept, the better you will be able to incorporate it into your playing.  So that’s a concept that just sunk in a little deeper.

For $15 a workshop?  Yeah, this is a good deal!  I’ll be going back for more.

Life imitating art…  I unearthed a copy of The Goonies that was languishing in the bargain DVD bin.  We watched this 80’s film treasure the other day.  I hadn’t seen this movie in its entirety since it’s theatrical release in 1985, so it was quite a treat to relive this crude and fantastic adventure.  Kids searching for buried treasure…awesome!

A few days later, I was Googling my former address in Brooklyn and found this bizarre parallel tale.  This November 10, 1910 article, courtesy of The New York Times Archives, details how two boys ransacked the building I lived in searching for BURIED GOLD!

There were a lot of stories about that old place, but I’d never heard this one before!  "…visions of oceans of ice cream sodas and mountains of candy…"  Haha, how much more Goonies can you get?  Fantastic!  I love this story!  So weird to think that I lived in this building.  I used to spend a lot of time in the basement of that building…repairing the furnace…myself…with rubber bands…

Was there really gold there?  Well, we may never know.  In July 2000, I pointed out a number of cracks and bulges in the east wall of the building to the new owner.  I told him that without repairs, the building would come down.  He shrugged it off saying that he had engineers tell him the building was fine.  Three years later on July 11, 2003, my prediction came true.  Actually, the building was evacuated, condemned, and demolished, but same difference only less messy.

Fortunately, I wasn’t living there any more.  That would have sucked.  In hind sight, I’ve never been so glad to move because my rent was tripled!

And if there was any gold, surely it would have been discovered during demolition.  Right?

For anyone who isn’t already saving 79% off the cover price by subscribing to Cosmopolitan, sidle up to your local newsstand and take a peek at the February 2008 issue, page 149. There’s a lovely interview with Jen, thoughtfully translated into Paris Hilton-ish to save space and reader effort.

I also get my first two photographs in a national magazine. Alas, they neglected my photo credit.

Oh, and something I didn’t need to see… Page 38, top right.

When you’re a kid with wheels, one of your favorite things is a very steep hill.   From ages 4 through 8, that’s what I had just steps from my front door in a tiny Connecticut town.  Our street was connected to its parallel neighbor by a sheer asphalt drop we called "Bat Hill".  I never saw that many bats there, but it needed a terrifying name nonetheless.

This was the late 70’s, and despite the advent of the Atari 2600, playing outside reigned supreme.  Before my brother and I graduated to yellow banana seat bikes, we cruised the neighborhood on bright yellow Big Wheels.  (I don’t know why our parents got us yellow rides…I suppose they wanted to maximize our visibility, but they sure attracted lots of bees…)

Bat Hill was a formidable incline.  It took us quite some time to gather the courage to descend from the very top.  One day, I went out to join the neighborhood kids and found they had set up a ramp at the base of Bat Hill.  They were jumping a line of Big Wheels Evel Knievel style, using speed gained from the very top of Bat Hill.  I climbed to the top, heart racing, and began a fierce descent.  Big Wheels, like tricylces, pedal the front wheel directly, so when you’re rolling fast, you just have to lift your feet and let it fly.  Well, my first attempt was a record distance.  Apparently, everyone else just rolled from the top, but I had pedaled from the get go until I had to lift my feet!

Infamous Bat Hill

Well, I was thinking about this the other day when I realized I could visit Bat Hill using wonderful Google Earth!  One cool feature of Google Earth is that you can measure distances and elevations.  This means you can calculate the grade of a hill, which expresses the distance dropped divided by the length of the drop as a percentage.  (You’ll see the percent grade on those steep grade truck signs intended to keep trucks out of furniture stores…)  As best I can measure, Bat Hill drops 44 feet in 438 feet, a robust 10% grade.  There are steeper hills out there, but still that’s a good ride for a Big Wheel!  (In comparison, the Derby Downs Soap Box Derby track in Akron, Ohio is twice as long, but carries a 6% drop for most of its length.)

We got pretty nuts on that hill.  One of our favorite things to do was to pull the red sides off our wooden wagon and ride it down Bat Hill, steering by it’s narrow black handle.  As kids, we were pretty indestructible.  If I were to try that today, it would be grounds for a Darwin Award!

On Monday night, my friend Josh Irving played at a fairly new Brazilian jazz club in New York called Cachaça.  Josh is a saxophonist I’ve known for nearly nine years now (has it been that long already?).  His quartet featured long time collaborator George Dulin on piano, Danny Zanker on bass, and special guest Francisco Mela on drums.  Josh kindly gave me an opportunity to sit in on his song "9 Goes To 10".  I didn’t know it at the time, but Jen took this video on her digital camera:

It was really dark in there!  This is the first video of me playing since high school (I dare anyone to try to dig that recording up!), so I thought I’d post it here.  This is actually my least favorite of Josh’s compositions to play on…it just has this way of kicking my ass and is very difficult for me to find anything melodic to play over the chord changes.  Last time I saw Josh perform this tune, he had Dan Pratt  playing tenor.  Dan made it sound like a piece of cake!  Not surprisingly, as everything he plays is supremely lyrical.  That’s one of the beautiful things about New York…there are always brilliant musicians to inspire you!

Incidently, Josh and I recorded a more relaxed version of this tune in the studio in 2000.  It’s totally different in this setting…

Anyway, this really has me excited to play more jazz.  I have a very busy next three months, but I’m managing to get some tenor time in there.

This is something my brother and I learned from a book many years ago.  We used to do this in my grandmother’s yard.  Today, I showed Jen how to make rockets from matchsticks for her In The New blog.  I thought the video was so cool I’d cross post it here.

These are wooden matches, which don’t work as well as paper matches because they are heavier.  Some warmer and less blustery day, I’ll try this again and shoot for better results.

If you want to learn more, check out this Matchstick Rockets site for information and safety tips.  They claim launches up to 12 feet distance.  As I recall, 6 to 8 feet was about average when my brother and I tried this.

DISCLAIMER: This is playing with fire! Kids get adult supervision. Protect your eyes, and be careful not to burn yourself or other people. Don’t do this inside, or in the presence of flammable materials or vegetation.

Hey, guess what?  There are black swans!  According to the Wikipedia article, Cygnus atratus are from Australia.  I took these pictures of one in Rancho Santa Fe, CA.

I poked around Wikipedia for something interesting.  Black Swan Pas de Deux is from the third scene of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake.  "In ballet, a pas de deux (French, step/dance for two) is a duet in which ballet steps are performed together."  Well, I thought that was relevant because these two swans were mirroring each other’s actions for a while.  You can see in two of the pictures below, but they were synchronized preening for several minutes.  Who knew it was a pas de deux?

The black one was hanging out at the boat ramp as Jen and I walked around the lake.  We were told its mate had been eaten by a coyote.  How sad!

Kind of shy, but seemed to appreciate the company.  The white one swam over while I was taking pictures.

Of course, I couldn’t resist making LOL SWANS!  Haha…