Thank you, Shankar Vedantam

 I got 15 things listed last night, and as I did that, Shankar Vedantam, one of the regulars on NPR, was doing an article on social mobility. He talked about places where there's a lot of mixing of the classes, and places where there's less. He had terms for them, which I forget. 

I would say that in moving from Hawaii to California, I moved from one extreme to the other. In Hawaii I knew people who were doctors and such highly placed things, and people who were struggling like I was. There was a whole spectrum. After living on the mainland for a few years, I remember sitting one day and realizing that I was in a system where if someone made $5000 more a year than you, or less, you'd never meet them. In fact I even got a scolding at work for daring to associate with a guy who was considered to be lower than myself on the social scale. (Although he was probably as well paid or better, electronics being such a poor-paying field.) 

Hawaii was such a fun mixing pot. You could get to know all kinds of people. The old lady we kids knew, "Miss" Wilder, actually had a Steinway grand piano in her living room. Other people in the same neighborhood were scraping by, it was a mix of at least one single mother with a kid who drew on his bedsheets and I think a few old guys with a mix of family hanging on with them, who were probably living off of disability payments from serving in WWII. And there were families who were quite well off, the Silvas, the Hertz's, and of course 'way up at the end of the street, the Kaisers. 

People back in Hawaii have no awareness of this. There's a great feeling of, why would anyone want to come back? Especially if they didn't make a fortune on the mainland? It's not something that I've seen explained very well or even, really, at all. I can say, simply, "I grew up here. My memories are here". But there's a lot more to it. I suppose it's up to me to find a way to explain it, to make visible the largely invisible, in the same way George Orwell showed in "Such, Such Were The Joys" how St. Cyprian's formed his worldview. 

Everyone's seen those scientific representations of a synapse, the basic element in the brain. Two nerves end in sort of bulges and don't quite touch, sending signals to each other. Hawaii, or Oahu at least (and this is why I have no interest in living on one of the other islands) is like a sort of synapse out in the middle of a vast ocean, with Asian culture being one half and Western the other. 

I'm really happy that Hawaii has become "more Japanese" over the time I've been away. There were always Japanese things, such as the network of Jodo Shinshu temples and wonderful Japanese gift stores like Iida's and if you knew where to go, like this tiny place near the tire section of the Ala Moana Sears, you could get a real Japanese bento as opposed to a local plate lunch, but Hawaii was dominated by on one hand the old plantation culture that gave us the plate lunch and saimin and Pidgin and "going holoholo". But these days there's what a local would call "A lotta really Japanese/Kapani stuffs". 

Now, Japan is actually at least as class-stratified as the US mainland is. But Hawaii is not the US mainland nor is it the Japanese home islands, either of the two "home countries" I grew up thinking of, away over the ocean. It's 2500 miles from anywhere and the state's whole population is smaller than that of the California county I live in now.

And when you're out there in the middle of a vast ocean on a relatively little island, people have to let their hair down a bit. 

I got about 45 minutes' practice done last night and when I went to sleep it was raining. I woke up around 2, and looked outside - it was wet. I got up and took a closer look and it was just Chuey next door washing one of his vehicles. Otherwise things were dry, if a bit cloudy. And cold. 

To make the numbers work out the way I want them to this week, I can't take any more money out of the bank by using my card. But I wanted to go buy some of the bags Whole Foods is selling because when they're gone they're gone. 

So I got the trumpet out and made sure I had valve oil and Blistex and that everything was working correctly, and, stopping only to drop off a bag of trash, rode over to Whole Foods. It was about 4:15 when  I got there and set up. It was cold and even more important, it was windy. 

I wanted to get $10, because that would cover buying the bags. Anything more than that would be a bonus. I've not played in something like a year, several months anyway.  There were a lot of people going in and out although it wasn't like yesterday. I got over a dollar in change, then a tattered $5, then through some very slow going, occasional $1's and once I had my $10 I packed up. 

Shortly after setting  gained some company: a beggar who's a regular, who calls out in a dull voice, "Any spare change" like a statement more than a question. He sat by the Whole Food sign to intercept people in cars coming out, and got some "drops". My playing done, I went in and bought a dozen of the brown bags, which came to about $8 (but not without the checker trying to charge me for the green ones and wanting $18 from me, fortunately where the bags are was right near that checkout) and walked out with my prize. 

As I stuffed my new bags into my old green Whole Foods bag, the beggar made his statement to me regarding spare change. I found that laughable. "You saw how hard I had to work to make $10 out here". I then explained that the public pays beggars better than musicians but as a musician "I get to feel a bit less ashamed of myself". The beggar retorted, "I don't have any choice." I went on to say the public pays beggars more because they need someone to feel better than. I was going to explain that musicians make less because the public kind of envies them, that they stuck with learning an instrument, but by this point the beggar had actually walked away.

I rode off, deciding I'll try out playing by the Old Spaghetti Factory. That spot is sheltered from the wind, and might have a pretty good crowd. It did, but there were loud bands and loud canned music everywhere. So I tried my luck on the corner where "The Farmers Union" restaurant is, and while I got a $5 from one of the drunks, mainly I got a lot of boozy cheerfulness but it didn't occur to the tipsy tipplers to tip. 

I also began to notice that a surprising portion of the crowd were zombies. Some were really obvious, as when a person becomes one of the undead, appearance and hygiene slide. But some were less so, and at one point I played softly while a dad went by pushing a baby carriage, then realized the "dad" was in fact a scumbag and the carriage didn't carry a child but instead the usual crap zombies drag around. 

OK, I thought, I'll take the $5 and call it good. The ride home was cold, of course, because it's getting down into the 30s overnight lately. I got my Whole Foods bags to last me the next couple of years, and I have enough also to treat myself to a bottle of my favorite makgeolli. 

I'm glad I've been dragging my feet about selling the trumpet. There's a bit of nostalgia that's been keeping me from selling it, and more recently I thought I'd better keep it as long as possible because it's a thing I can always go out and make money with. 

But there's another factor. The shakuhachi is not very easy to play Western music on. It can be done, and people do it, but that's not really what it's about or what it sounds best doing. The trumpet, being a Western instrument, is great for playing Western music so not only can I make money with the thing but I can get my Western music ya-ya's out and save the shakuhachi for what it's meant to do. 

Meanwhile in shakuhachi-land, there are tons and tons of pieces, not only the honkyoku or standard classics but tons of minyo which are folk or children's songs. Plus whatever shy shite I might just make up on the spot. 

The thing is, I might get $1200 for the trumpet by selling it, but if I get back into the busking habit, I might make 3X that and I can also mix in some shakuhachi busking since that's what I plan to do back in Hawaii. I could even, just before I leave, pack the trumpet up really well and have Ken send it to me when I'm all settled in. Of course I can always pick up a Yamaha student horn and my preferred mouthpiece is a cheap 3C but I kind of like my humble little Wayne Bergeron horn that you, too, can have for a mere 3500 smackers or so. (I'm in to the tune of about 2 grand so basically the thing's paid for itself so far.) 

This will give me a chance to not only ease into being a shakuhachi busker, but get a decent flow of busking money in sooner and also I can take a different approach to being a trumpet player. All the "on paper" learning on the trumpet from here on out, is the chromatic scale which I pretty much already know. Everything else is going to be by ear, for fun. I'm no longer going to care where I am in this or that book, but can I play this or that neat little tune? I'm not going to be in anyone's orchestra, I don't need to do all that music-reading stuff. 

Reading music as a shakuhachi player is different. For one thing the system is dead simple. It's an easy system to sight-read. And the scores look neat.