As I write, it's the Thursday after the Wednesday after Mardi Gras which I actually watched some of on YouTube, thanks to nola.com which is the New Orleans home TV station. Yes, I watched the New Orleans one, the real one.
I'd been doing a blog about my busking activities in the so-called Silicon Valley, where it's been observed that the only silicon left here is in the landfills and the groundwater, the whole area being effectively one big Superfund site. Busking, or playing music on the street for tips, is actually one of the more reliable ways to make what bare living this area can offer.
If busking blog numbers are any indication, though, no one cares. There were a few, and now there is one, Planet-wide, busking blog. That one belongs to a "Street Musician Daniel" in New Orleans. It contains much about finagling a free living from "the system" and a little about busking. That's fair enough, as I'm sure many more are interested in how to finagle a free living from "the system" than to earn it playing music on the streets of New Orleans.
But the day-to-day of playing music on the street can be pretty boring, as it's the same parade of nameless faceless donors and of one's fellow buskers, most are out there using their instrument as an attention getter to facilitate begging.
It took me a while, but I finally got out the habit of trying to relate to this area's street musicians. Besides their goal of making that day's cigarettes or pot or harder drugs, they really have no aspirations. Just turning the crank, they're just doing the same thing that the few who are lucky enough to still have office jobs do, just puttering along until it's time to knock off for the day.
I'd found a great place and time to busk, outside the local Whole Foods during the last hour or two in the evening before they close. By that time the beggars and petition-hustlers and so on have left, and the people going in and out of Whole Foods are done for the day, done with work, done even with their dinner probably, and in more of a relaxed, "what the hell" mood. And I felt I could work on what I wanted to work on, and they'd be receptive to that.
And they apparently were. I finished up one night and went into the store to buy a few groceries and a fat housewife followed me in and handed me a few bucks and gushed about my playing. I finally asked her if she knew what songs I'd been playing, and she had no idea. It's how you say it, apparently.
But the weather got cold (into the 30s in the evening) and the area I stood got blocked by Christmas trees for sale, and I got sick and was coughing my lungs out for a while, and somehow a couple months went by at least.
What practice I'd been doing had been after everything else was done for the day, and since I'd been on this weird night-mode schedule for years, it'd generally been from about 6:30-7:30 AM and without my best energy or attention. I finally decided this night schedule is stupid, and got myself around to a day schedule again.
So I practiced on the day, Mardi Gras, and had the most horrible "double buzz" making a very rough tone. I was horrified at how bad I sounded. The next day I got up and was decided that F this, if I can't take some time off without sounding this horrible, then I really need to re-consider playing the trumpet. I was ready to go up to "Hornucopia" in San Carlos to look for a decent used clarinet, and if they didn't have anything I liked, it looked like West Valley Music in Mountain View would have something. But before I left, I'd practice an hour on my trumpet and the double buzz was just about all gone. So I'm saving my money. It was just a relatively long layoff.
So I'm re-starting this blog, with a bit more honestly about how little about busking there will actually be in it.
On a pound-for-pound basis, there may be more about pie. When I was a kid in the 1970s, when the hungry times were just starting, on the back of a Ritz cracker box there would be this recipe for "Mock Apple Pie". First it was just like wallpaper, it's just there on the box, but after seeing it so many times I started to wonder... you were supposed to mash up the crackers somehow and make them into something like pie filling? Where were you supposed to get a pie crust, and the crackers, and the sugar, and all that stuff, all together in one place? In what world .... I mean once, exactly once, someone made those Rice Krispy Treats, and I still don't know what they taste like because the adults, being bigger and stronger, got them all. In what world ..... the pie is a lie.
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