I practiced last night while watching "Cadillac Desert" which is an old-ish PBS program some people have put on YouTube. As always these days, it's not "video" as I understand it, being 1-3 frames per second and sound not always in sync, but I see YouTube these days as a way to see something to decide whether to get it on DVD.
I practiced a good hour and a half, starting with octaves on the headjoint and that went really well. And I'm up to page 13 in the Wye book. The first notes, B-A-G, are easy to finger. The next one, C, is trickier because the thing held down by the left thumb has to be let up and while it doesn't make a difference as far as I can tell, the thing under the right pinky has to be held down. The result is the hand position has to be thought about a lot more as going from B to C the flute wants to rotate which not only makes me feel like I might drop it, but plays hell with the sound.
As for sound, I'm sounding better, and I just did tons of little partial scales from G to C and back down, over and over, to work on that hand position. I'm also happy to say the octave of the C pops out nice and clear and even piercing.
It's good to see I'm getting stronger at this. I've simply got to get good on the flute. If I'm running into a "glass ceiling" in trumpet then I've got to get good at something else. At least I can *make* flutes. I've got a book coming that should show me how to work on flutes. I've got to have some skill that makes me useful in the world.
That skill can't be something modern like computer programming, as I grew up seeing how it put my dad in the poorhouse. Any "New, fast-moving" field is just one that's going to fast-move you right out of a job as humans are "advanced" right out of the loop. To me it's only a viable skill if it was viable 500 years ago. Farmer? Sure. Shoemaker? Fine. Tattoist? Prostitute? Pickpocket? Street musician? All well and good. "It is a beggar's pride that he is not a thief" is an old Japanese saying and I prefer to not pick locks or pockets, but "Lockpicking Lawyer" on YouTube does all right.
The thing is that street musicians are becoming vanishingly rare. Mine is the last blog on Earth that even discusses busking once in a world. Likewise, in my city of over a million, I am the last street musician when I get out there. It was a viable occupation 500 years ago and it is now.
I've just got to get up to speed on the flute! At least when my lip wasn't wearing out for the night I think my trumpet playing was getting some "guts" and people were reacting to that and that's why tips got so much better. I'm hoping it won't take me so long to get some "guts" into my playing on the flute and I'm already getting the idea my ability to keep playing for hours might be better on it.
I packed 6 things and took off at 7 for FedEx. It was quite a load. The drop-offs went fine and I picked up a "Dutch Apple" pie that someone had left on one of the planters. I'm guessing a couple were shopping, guy grabs the pie, then on the way to their car the gal looks at it and goes, "Eww, it's past date" and they leave it there.
I didn't need to look for any packing material so I just rode over to Tom's to drop off the pie with him. He ate half of it right away - "This is my dinner ... and my breakfast!". We hung out and talked for a bit. He told me about "The Whacker", a guy who would go around to different construction sites in his car, masturbating furiously. Hence the name. The construction workers would shoot at him with their nail guns. Great fun all around I'm sure.
He also told me about how a local character, "Cowboy", is now so spun out on meth that he's taken to actually dressing like Crocodile Dundee and I dunno, walking up and down Rogers Avenue that way or something. We talked about a lot of different things and had some good laughs.
And he even told me about this one Mexican flower seller he used to drive by all the time, who used to "make eyes" really obviously at people, plus he had this stereotypical thin "Mexican" type mustache, plus in addition he'd stick the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth... the "sexy" flower seller.
I told him about the interesting people-watching around King and Story, a notorious crime-ridden area, and we really had some laughs. He *is* a good guy to know and if things go to shit for me somehow I'd probably be able to pay some rent and sleep somewhere in that shop of his. I just want to get him actually out busking and we talked about that also. I told him I was about to get new springs for my cornet and I can get one of those plunger type mutes for that wah-wah sound and a new mouthpiece for it, come to think of it (I had a 3B but normally play a 3C) and we'd be quite a pair, with him, tall, playing a trumpet and me, short, playing the shorter instrument, a cornet.
when we were talked out I took off and checked my usual places, and found two packages of glazed mini-donut things in a couple of different flavors, a small green bell pepper, and a jicama. Those, I guess with the pie, are the day's freebees. If I weren't on a low-carb diet I've have split the pie with Tom, and I also passed on a large Ziploc bag of small pretzels that if they were on my diet, could have heated to de-germ and de-stale them and eaten those. The jicama turned out to be too big/old.
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