The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Blue Hydrangea Blues

    The title of this week’s improvised guitar piece borrows from Rilke’s poem “Blaue Hortensie,” or “Hydrangea Blues.” My own modern jazz style translation (of the mood) or adaptation, takes the original into an impressionistic mode:

    Blue Hydrangea Blues
    (after Rilke)

    drab green on a paint palette
    these wry leaves dull and raspy
    under the lower umbrellas
    not wear blue but pretend blue

    teary and weary lost and losing
    like the old blue book essay tests
    yellow highlights over inky violets
    blue ballpoint and gray pencil

    pale and tired a worn toolbelt
    no more stains nothing going on
    one feels the fly by of a small life

    but shocked the blue refreshens
    in the parasol and where it touches
    the green rejoices

    Played on the Telecaster Squier guitar, one of the first out of the new Fender factory in Japan, early 80s, with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups. D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings – .011-.050 Jazz Light. Amp is a Crate GFX-15 with DSP.

    And a short slideshow:

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    So, the weekly vibe has evolved from Metal Monday and Telecaster Tuesday guitars and songs to include poetry and photography. Translating one to the other you get easily lost, fall out of the band’s pocket. But there’s much to discover. For example, while digging into Rilke’s German text of “Blaue Hortensie,” I discovered that blau is also modern slang for being drunk. I was briefly tempted to lean into a jazzy, late-night, pretend pissed translation, lured by the rhyme with raspy, and tests, but Rilke’s melancholy is softer than that. It’s not angry like punk, not a mean drink; it’s just faded like, well, hydrangeas on a hot summer night in August. We’re not quite there yet, so the temptations to keep messing around the fretboard of words continues.

  • Dinosaur

    McLuhan, paraphrasing David Hume, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “…there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant” (p. 27).

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  • On Photography

    I recently saw that Instagram now boasts around 100 million posts per day, but that reel videos are becoming more popular than single photos, and I was reminded of McLuhan’s mentioning Joyce on photography. From “Understanding Media”:

    “To say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an ‘allnights newsery reel,’ that substitutes a ‘reel’ world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effects of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thought processes than anybody else. His verdict on the ‘automatic writing’ that is photography was the ‘abnihilization of the etym.’ He saw the photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper, of the word, whether written or spoken. But if ‘etym’ (etymology) means the heart and core and moist substance of those beings that we grasp in words, then Joyce may well have meant that the photo was a new creation from nothing (ab-nihil), or even a reduction of creation to a photographic negative. If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent.” (McCluhan, “Understanding Media,” 1964, p. 193)

    Withdrawing from Instagram will today probably have little to do with photography, more to do with anti-virulence.

    Roland Barthes questions photo selection: “This fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects – of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other?…Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” (“Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,” 1980, p. 6).

    Nor it that we take, not the someone or something, but some other. But we take a photo of someone, or something. Or we might take a photo of a photo.

    This impulse to take a photo of someone or something every one or thing that we see, for surely impulse it must be for as I type this at least another 100,000 pics are being uploaded to Instagram, must come from somewhere, but where, to what end or purpose, what human ailment or surprise to annotate to put on display explains it?

    And as I walk around the pad this morning, coffee cup in hand, raising a blind here, opening a window there, passing paintings and bookshelves, I pause to notice that we’ve not many photographs on display, framed and on the wall or sitting on a shelf somewhere. We’ve old photo books tucked away (I’m afraid to open, for fear the pages might be all stuck together). And the impulse comes, to take a pic, and I succumb:

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    Dancing in a Field
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    McLuhan tells a joke about the friend who compliments the mother of a cute kid, “What a cute kid!” “Oh, that’s nothing,” the mother replies; “you should see her photograph.” The teapots in the frame have faded.
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    At the beach at El Porto (not Hermosa – in this one it’s the frame that lies), oil tanker in distance, the frame nostalgic.
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    Finished with photo post, I can now go outside and sit with my laptop and browse through the Reader, looking for Wordless Wednesday photographs?

  • Moon Path Melody

    The title of this week’s guitar piece, posted to my YouTube channel, Vers Libre Guitar, is “Moon Path Melody.” Last Fall, I posted another piece with moon in the title, “Out in the Moonlight.” A couple of years ago, On Youtube Music, I started a playlist called “Songs with Moon in the Title.” There are now 65 tracks, close to four hours. I update it sporadically, when I discover a new moon titled piece I like, which I did recently, adding “When the Moon was Yellow (And the Night was Young),” from 1963, performed by Ethel Ennis.

    The title “Moon Path Melody” connects to the Wallace Stevens poem, “Lunar Paraphrase” (1918). “The moon is the mother of pathos and pity,” Stevens says.

    But my guitar piece didn’t sound, as I fumbled with a few takes to get it on the phone video, full of either pathos or pity, maybe touches, but more like a moonbeam shining and flickering off a steel railroad track with a runaway train approaching across a rickety trestle. I had wanted something slow and sustained with just a few notes spaced like stars in a twilight sky next to a slight moon (which I saw a few weeks ago, Jupiter and Venus in the offing, Mercury too, a thin crescent moon sliding in the sky to the north of the planets). But my piece sounded too slow and halting and I could picture listeners not going past a few seconds.

    So while “Moon Path Melody” can go different directions, for the video I ended up making it quicker and messier than I first intended. Notes in the basic melody include: d e g, c d a, g a c d, b c d a g. Basic chords used include: G, Am, and Dm6. In the video I’m playing the Telecaster Squier guitar, one of the first out of the new Fender factory in Japan, early 80s, with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups, and with D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings – .011-.050 Jazz Light. The amp is a Crate GFX-15 with DSP.

    The video is short, 1 minute 31 seconds, in keeping with the channel’s style.

  • Post Forth

    Yesterday the annual gathering of neighbors filling the street with tables and chairs and umbrellas for a block potluck affair the air almost eerily quiet as the fireworks friendlies have finally after the last few years diminishing now gone silent until the sanctioned ones near the rivers and parks in the distance erupted at nautical dusk. We did however break out the guitars for some driveway punk blues but that went mostly unnoticed as folks by then had mostly gone forth to nap off the noon meal.

    Now the morning after and me up at does the block still asleep and “what’s the matter with me,” as Dylan sang in his “Watching the River Flow.” And indeed I have stopped to read a book, and a few blogs, one of my favorites in fact, “Course of Mirrors,” this morning I opened to find a lovely piece on the spaces we might find for the downtime necessary for listening, in turn necessary for conversation, with the fox or the morning crow, those I can relate to, but an art form I fear I am losing, the chit chat and banter the ping pong talent necessary to navigate the daily slings and arrows cushions and shields of small talk. “What’s the matter with me; I don’t have much to say,” Dylan sang, but and continued to sing, it not seeming to matter whether one has something to say or not to continue saying it. So I post forth.

    Aging of course will do that to you, try one’s patience, clud one’s ears, preclude conversation and closet one’s thoughts. All of which are necessary (patience, clean ears, open door thought policy) to traverse the block picnic without sounding like a clod. A blockhead? Clod once suggested though an earth body, not necessarily opposed to soul, but a carrier. In any case, being outdoors, one is able to slide away from the potential awkward more easily than in the confines of the pizza parlor table:

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    Was just now thinking, this writing live, what pic or pics I might post when I’m ready to post this post masterpiece. With over 10,000 pics in my Google photo app I’ve a lot to choose from. I enter the word flag into the search bar, looking for a pic I have in mind, but of course Google can’t read my mind, much as it would like to. For that you need a real conversation, which you can’t have with an A.I. engine. Then again, how many conversations have I had recently with real people that began to feel like I was talking to an A.I.? Or sound like an A.I. on my end of it? You can’t listen to an ordinary conversation on the street, Beckett said, without noting the inherent chaos. Something like that. He had just climbed into, or out of, a London cab, on the dashboard of which a call for help from some distant world tragedy. I forget the details, and that’s one of my problems with small talk these days, I forget what I’m talking about mid sentence, the flag of my tongue only half unfurled.

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    And I picture myself hanging on a wall, not literally of course, maybe one of my paintings given away or sold at a garage sale that then found it’s way into a thrift store, the flag of my indisposition hanging irrelevantly, and in the foreground of my mind a statue of Mother Mary, who once came to me in times of trouble, or allowed me to come to her.

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    In the still still still of the morning, I lift a heavy voice. Still, still with thee, and if not thee, certainly with Susan.

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  • and not only that but

    and and and and and not only that but
    another one and more where that one came
    from but anything but that but last but
    not least and close but you know no ifs ands
    or buts about it merely but that and
    but you were told and a long time ago
    but old now no how to go not only
    that but this outside of but for you and

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  • A Bite of Bop

    During the Pandemic when goblin mode started to set in, we hosted shows live on Instagram, almost every evening, guitar hour, my brothers and I, with special guests appearing every so often, a few of my sisters, and a few friends. We each took one evening of the week, developed a theme, and played and sang songs, told stories, chatted with the audience, fielding comments, watching dialog between audience members slide down the screen. We dialed in remotely. Also in the audience tuned in friends and friends of friends, and a few Instagram strangers who happened in from time to time. We called the show “Live at Five.”

    The Pandemic dissolved and with it our show, though episodes were saved in archives. Instagram now disallows live capability for users with less than 1,000 followers, which, according to reports, close to 75% of Instagram users have. I never came close. In any case, how does an individual follow 1,000 accounts? Videos take up a lot of space, and the emperor wears no clothes. In a moody fit of Instagramitis, I deleted my account, and with it around three years of once a week hourly shows.

    And then I moved to a YouTube channel where I’ve been posting original guitar piece videos about weekly. My brother CB was already there, posting metal pieces. He’d been bummed at my jettisoning Instagram. As Instagram moved more and more toward reels, ignoring amateurs and their close knit coteries, trying to compete with TikTok and its platform for “creators,” YouTube too has recently entered the fray with its “Shorts,” not the kind you wear. There are also issues of server costs, spam, and forcing professionalization. The four walls are now the wall to wall television screens Ray Bradbury predicted in “Fahrenheit 451.”

    None of this bothers me much. We don’t even know what consciousness is. Our minds are full of ghost following. Be that as it may, I’ve been enjoying YouTube. I use it mainly for music, following a few guitar masters, professional and amateur, posting my original work defined by an algorithm early on definitely not a planet, not even a Pluto. Pretzel music. Guitar is usually taught using some “method” or other. A method is a developmental approach, step by step, first a few notes on one string, then adding a few more notes on a second string, the instructor promoting repetition of right moves. But the guitar remains a folk instrument, by which I mean one that defies algorithms. If my playing follows a method or rule, it’s never play the same thing the same way twice. A rule often broken.

    Thinking up a name for my channel I settled on Vers Libre Guitar, trying to signal a break from traditional constraints, and being naturally unable to play in the pocket anyway, a musical term that means keeping in time with others. I don’t use a metronome or backing tracks. But I suppose we all use some sort of blueprints. In today’s post I tried to make up a bop piece, bebop being a kind of vers libre in the jazz scene of the early 40’s, though of course in the process building its own rules and expectations, one of which was ignoring the audience. “A Bite of Bop” is 53 seconds long, but it’s posted as a video, not a short, notes and chords in the description.

  • Memory Foam

    She dwells on the foam in El Porto
    on the surf raft yelling HYPERION!
    riding the yellowish mush to shore
    Happy as the sand is hot and tan
    towel hopping across the soft beach
    parentless friends three to a wave
    tousseled and sunbleached freckles
    they fall all wet in the sponge sand
    and who will walk to the Surf Rite
    Inn for a basket of snacks and cold
    drinks for it’s all day at the beach
    the floppy summer kids marine air
    mornings and uncombed hair fresh
    as thin honey and poured delays
    dizzy getting up melting memory
    to stay at the beach all day a walk
    away downhill to strand and blue.

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    Beach Towels

  • Do It?

    “A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures….Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting” (from “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Bronte, 1847).

    Was out wandering the yard today and wondering the worth of yet another camera photo, already over 10,000 in my photos app, and the lyric “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?” came to me.

    Then I remembered Alice, who was “beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” (from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Caroll, 1865).

    Likewise, we look for photos in blog posts, but a post with only pictures seems incomplete, its blogger in a down and dirty hurry, not much to say, but wanting to say it anyway, and the pics tell that story, but what’s a story without words? But what do I know, aging with a growing sense of “undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings”?

    Cartoons often tell stories without words, but to simply copy and paste one without reference or comment tells another story, one of sharing boredom. Maybe blogging is another form of graffiti: tags and throw-ups, (master)pieces, stencils – click for permission.

    “And if they have the words I can tell to you
    To help you on the way down the road
    I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats
    ‘Cause it’s all been said before
    Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off, ha
    You didn’t have to come here anyway

    So, remember, every picture tells a story, don’t it?
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it? Whoo
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
    Etc.

    (Rod Stewart, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” 1972.)

    Here are four photographs that may or may not tell a story: pink hydrangea blossoms backlit by the sun; under an apple tree with a patio and dry patch of yellow beige grass in the near distance; a red pot in the middle of a green muddle of leaves and branches; a pot of lavender next to a dry bird bath.

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  • Happy Dayfather

    Joyce mentions the dayfather in the Aeolus episode of “Ulysses,” where Bloom wanders through the newspaper rooms. The dayfather represented the union workers in the shop, and was chosen by the workers.

    “A DAYFATHER
    He walked on through the caseroom passing an old man, bowed, spectacled, aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs’ ads, speeches, divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now. Sober serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I’d say. Wife a good cook and washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no damn nonsense.”

    We’re in Joyces’s “Ulysses” again. Bloom, an ad canvasser, is walking through the printing shop of the Freeman’s Journal.

    “Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron’s saint Kevin’s parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen …? Of course it’s years ago. Noise of the trams probably. Well, if he couldn’t remember the dayfather’s name that he sees every day.”

    Night Mother

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  • Happy Bloomsday!

    A cartoon like cover of Joyce's novel "Ulysses" featuring the title above Joyce's eyeglasses above his name on a field of green blue.

    Traditionally, “Ulysses” fans take to pubs for readings and reverie of the book’s details in celebration of the day, June the 16th, the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora, and the two would later light out for the territory ahead of all the rest.

    For today’s celebration, I’ve contributed a stylized illustration of the first cover, from 1922.

    Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” takes place on one day, June 16th, in the Dublin of 1904, following the character Leopold Bloom, whose wanderings around town map out a middenpanoramic search of show and tell. Bloom sells newspaper ads, crosses paths and hangs out with Stephen Dedalus, son for a day, while Bloom’s wife, Molly, keeps to bed, warming up for her fall to Blazes Boylan and her fall to sleep episodic dreamdrift.