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On Friday, February 9th, 2024, at 8:00 pm, I’ll be returning to the Flat Iron. I’ll be performing a co-bill with Alan Peterson. Tickets are available here.
Coming off of a great set at the Eno House in Hillsborough, I look forward to playing a slightly longer piano set. Please join us if you can.
On Thursday, January 25, 2024, at the Eno House Artist’s Den, I played my first show of the year. I opened for Nikki Meets the Hibachi and played for about 45 minutes.
I hadn’t ever performed at Eno House, so I had no idea of what to expect. I arrived straight from work. I caught a little rain on the way but had no stuffy traffic. Waze took me directly to the the venue without issue. I parked right in front. When I got there, John and Elaine from Nikki were finishing up their soundcheck. The club owner invited me to play the house Steinway piano, which I welcomed.
I checked a few songs and felt comfortable with how things sounded. Playing an unfamiliar piano comes with its own challenges. A real, live piano is a living, breathing thing. It has its own personality, its own temperament. My Yamaha travel piano has weighted keys but no personality and the temperament of a koala bear. The piano at Eno House was like a strong but delicate tree. Each key was weighted just a little differently from another.
After soundcheck, I enjoyed catching up with folks I hadn’t seen in ages. The last time I opened for Nikki was thirty years ago at the Skylight Exchange in Chapel Hill, NC. People arrived in twos and threes and mingled, talking of times past.
A piano/vocal set is something that would be difficult for me to play on the fly. I planned out my setlist a month in advance and had it in stone the week before. I’m new to piano as a performing instrument. It’s not like guitar for me, which I sometimes zone out on while playing. The set had a nice design, too. I put four familiar songs among the unfamiliar ones. I played two new songs, “Evangeline” and “Crashed on Neptune,” as well as “Satellites.”
I’ve missed playing out live. I haven’t been performing as much as I like to and I look forward to more shows this year. Recording is fun and all. Playing online venues has its place. But playing original songs live to a room full of people who are actually listening is sacred. Coincidentally, Eno House used to be a church.
After uploading my latest podcast, the last thing I expected was a total website failure.
A 500 Internal Server Error occurs when a web browser can’t access a website because of a problem with the code. Apparently, gremlins ransacked my website. But how? I have two-factor authentication, or “2FA” as they call it. I get a code sent to me whenever I login to my site. I send the code back and it verifies to the server that it’s me who’s logging in.
Puzzled, I contacted tech support. They responded quickly. But, the solution they provided was even more baffling. They said I needed to comb through thousands of lines of code and delete the malicious data. But it was important that I didn’t delete code that I actually needed.
Um . . . Ok?
I opened up a code editor for kicks to see if finding malicious code was something I could do. Not surprised, I had no idea what I was doing. None. The next day, I found a web company that advertised being able to fix general WordPress issues. I signed up for their service. They fixed the problem in about two hours for a reasonable price. Thank you, fixed.net.
The problem, as I learned, was that some of my plugins hadn’t been updated in a while. Un-updated plugins aren’t compatible with current versions of WordPress. I don’t understand how un-updated plugins are vulnerable to hacking, but that’s what happened.
Lesson learned, I guess.
TL;DR – Update your website plugins. The site you save may be your own.
Happy New Year! I hope 2024 treats you well.
One of my core values is creativity. One proven way to enhance one’s creativity is to read a lot.
This year, I plan to read eleven novels.
I chose this list based on reviews, my personal taste, and whether the novel was part of a series. Trust, Wager, The Guest List and Bee Sting made the list solely from favorable reviews I read. Birnam Wood, Death on the Nile, and Holly made the list because I enjoy reading works by their authors. The remaining books made the list because they are second in a series in which I’ve read the first novel.
Do a Google search for “why reading is important” and you’ll find dozens of benefits to reading. For one, reading enhances creativity. Reading a dialog or a description of a setting requires imagination. The more you imagine, the better you are able to create things like art or solutions to problems. Secondly, reading improves analytical skills. All writing consists of patterns. Nonfiction requires a premise, supporting statements, and a conclusion. Spotting assumptions in an essay, for example, can reveal what unspoken values the author holds. Fiction works in a similar way. Every scene of a story consists of five parts: an inciting event, complications, crisis, climax, and resolution. Reflecting on narrative structure in fiction can reveal insights into human nature. Thirdly, reading is entertaining. Different genres provide different experiences. A whodunnit may be a page turner while an African sci-fi fantasy novel like Black Leopard, Red Wolf may cause me to pause and reflect.
The only drawback to reading is eyestrain.
I spend thirty minutes a day reading books from my reading list. For these brief sessions, I immersion read. I have the audiobook and the text before me and I take it all in simultaneously. I wish this were an option for me back in high school with some of the more difficult literature we read. I find immersive reading to help not only in comprehension, but also in getting subtext from a reader’s performance.
What are you reading nowadays? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on the socials.
Works referenced:
A well written novel quenches my thirst for a good story. In hunting high and low for tales of adventure and intrigue, I stumbled upon a mind-bending sci-fi saga. The Hyperion Cantos features challenging ideas about society, culture, and the future. It spans four novels over 2,000 plus pages. Recently, I read the first novel, Hyperion.
Written by Dan Simmons and published in 1989, Hyperion won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Hyperion weaves six novellas together to tell a larger narrative. In that way, Hyperion takes a note from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
800 years in the future, society consists of a network of hundreds of planets called the Hegemony of Man. Artificial intelligence has evolved into its own society called the TechnoCore. Mutated humans called the Ousters are at war with the Hegemony. The TechnoCore and the Hegemony live in an unstable symbiosis. One world that’s outside the network, Hyperion, has strange temporal qualities. There, edifices called Time Tombs run backwards in time. An atemporal monster called the Shrike guards the Tombs. All three factions want to use the Time Tombs for different ends. Seven pilgrims make a one-way trip to the Time Tombs, each to make a request of the Shrike. As they make their way, each tells his or her story about why he or she has decided to make such a risky journey.
A priest tells the first tale. He wants to return to Hyperion because a parasite causes him tremendous pain. The further he gets from Hyperion, the more he hurts. A soldier tells the second tale. He desires to return to Hyperion to kill the Shrike. The Shrike seduced him, manipulated him, and almost used him to cause an interstellar war. A poet tells the third tale. He wants to return to Hyperion so that he can finish his magnum opus–the Shrike is his muse. A professor tells the fourth tale. He desires to go to Hyperion because his daughter had an accident there and she’s aging backwards. The professor holds his infant daughter in his arms throughout the novel. A private investigator tells the fifth tale. She goes to Hyperion because the Shrike Church offered her asylum to do so. She’s also pregnant with the cybrid offspring of John Keats, the poet (Weird, right?). A politician tells the last tale. He wants to go to Hyperion because his ancestors fought against the Hegemony, and he is a spy.
The strength of Hyperion is its world building. Humankind left Old Earth becuase someone opened a small black hole there. Oops. Familiar sci-fi tropes like wormholes and time debt get a fresh treatment. The wealthy, for example, have mansions with rooms on many worlds. Time debt is inevitable in space travel. Traveling at light speed creates a shorter relative time frame for the traveler. What if the traveler was a sailor and came to port every 11 years? And to the sailor, that 11 years was only a few months? Fresh context creates fresh story.
Hyperion makes relevant social commentary as well. What are the implications for Christianity and Judaism in an interstellar society? What happens if artificial intelligence maxes out? Is connectedness true progress?
The two weaknesses of Hyperion are more practical concerns than story issues. Would seven people be this chatty when traveling to face certain doom? Probably not. And then, the novel just sort of ends without resolving the overarching narrative. But then again, there are three other novels in the series. In that light, Hyperion serves as a prelude of a larger story.
On Saturday, August 26, 2023, the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation fundraiser hits the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, NC. I look forward to sitting in with the Maxell 90 on a few songs.
Back in the 90s, one of my favorite things to do when visiting a friend’s house was checking out their CD collection. I’d see what’s new, what’s gone, and what’s worn. Visiting a well curated CD collection was also my main way of discovering music that was new to me. Often, among Phish and Grateful Dead collections, I’d spot Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. I’ve always found it odd that Astral Weeks was usually the only Van Morrison album in these collections–no debut album with “Brown Eyed Girl,” no Tupelo Honey, only Astral Weeks with its introspective album cover. Recently I set out to discover why this particular Van Morrison album often stands alone.
Astral Weeks is Van Morrison’s second solo album. It was produced by Lewis Merenstein and released on November 29, 1968. Before going solo, Morrison fronted the Belfast rock band Them for a few years. Them turned out remarkable hits like “Gloria,” “Here Comes the Night,” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” By comparison, Astral Weeks contained no notable singles. Yet, even though the album only attained gold status in the U.S., it remains a favorite among critics and artists.
The opening title track sets a pensive, cosmic mood. “Astral Weeks,” the song, runs just over 7 minutes and alternates between two chords for most of that time. Morrison’s voice and lyrics take centerstage. Strings and flutes flow between the strums of his acoustic guitar. Noticeable drums don’t appear until side two. “The Way Young Lovers Do” foreshadows the jazzier sound he’d explore on Moondance. “Slim Slow Slider” winds the album to a mellow end.
For an album that doesn’t seem too concerned with mass appeal, Astral Weeks has influenced countless artists. It’s difficult to not hear its sway in songs like U2’s “All I Want Is You” and Radiohead’s “Airbag.” Each song on Astral Weeks has its own strength. But each song also contributes to the power of the whole album, as if the whole thing were one long song.
After hearing Astral Weeks, I’ve enjoyed exploring Van Morrison’s catalog. St. Dominic’s Preview and His Band and the Street Choir surprised me because I had no idea they even existed–such quality, such depth. Although, it’s lost on me why his sixth album, Tupelo Honey, is absent from streaming platforms.