Powerball vs. a book, any book
August 17th, 2008
I bought a Washington State lottery ticket when we were on vacation last week, while we were waiting for the ferry in Friday Harbor to take us to Orcas Island and then back to Anacortes, to drive from there to Seatac. It cost $1 and offered payout of $1.8M, which seemed “enough” at the time. It was the last real day of vacation, not counting the day it would take to get home, and I was entertaining the fantasy of being able to call in to the office and say, “I’m not coming back.” Of course, after taxes, it might not be a bad idea to keep working for at least a year or two while I figured out what to do with the money. The fantasy morphed a little and I entertained ideas of merely knowing I could say “enough!” at any time over the predicted rough spots of the coming work that waited for me at home.
Of course I didn’t win. I would be writing a different post if I had. I know someone who knows someone who won, once, and then lived on the income for 20 years, and now finds herself 20 years older and out of income and unskilled. This is not a good place to be.
However, one of my co-workers buys a ticket for every drawing. He plays the same number every time–a pair of easily-remembered birthdays, and buys 52 tickets at a time, the maximum allowed. He only has to check the website twice a week so his effort investment is minimal. It’s a persuasive argument. He also earns a lot more money than I do, and he has a partner to share living expenses. I am tempted by his arguments in favor of the outgo being an entertainment expense.
But we are different people, with different wirings (brain patterns), and different cash flows. Every time I dip my toe in the “what would I do with that money” pool, I find it pollutes me. Exactly how is not important. My thoughts turn to the winnings and how more money would change my life, and away from what it will take to change my life with the money and gifts I have available to me today.
We came home to truly difficult news about my own employment situation; massive uncertainty affecting a huge global workforce. I think about buying my way into relief with lottery tickets. This is not a good way to think.
On the way home from a day filled with swirling rumors of imminent employment chaos, I stopped at Borders, looking for a copy of the latest What Color is Your Parachute (the 2009, 39th edition is on the market. Am I that old? I used the 1980 edition in college…). Borders didn’t have that copy, but they did (and almost always do) have a bargain table of books marked at $2. This is almost less than the cost of gas needed to get to the library. I bought four books on the table; two were for fun, one for solace and encouragement, and one for investment: You Call the Shots, by Cameron Johnson. (Just now checked the reviews on Amazon for this, and I may have wasted the money, but I think the point is still valid.) (The reviews also support advice I’ve heard elsewhere, “Don’t take investment advice from a guy living in a refrigerator carton.” One might suspect the value of a $2 book about making money.)
Two dollars. A book about business, or a week of powerball tickets. (Note: It will take me about two hours to read the book, presuming I read it all. I read quickly and skim what doesn’t appear to be relevant.) Even if all I get out of the book is the opportunity to add one more review to my Amazon list, I’ll have more to show than I get for two losing powerball tickets.
For those times Borders isn’t selling books at $2, there’s always the thrift shop. Not long ago, someone retired and dumped an entire collection of best-selling business books into the Habitat Restore, where they eventually sold at $1 for a bundle of five. I didn’t buy any of those; they were mostly tales of life in big corporations, not advice for making it on eBay selling art. But the point is still valid. Lots of information for not very much money at all. Vastly higher ROI (return on investment) than powerball.
Caveat: It’s not just the idea.
(Steph quoting Ramit Sethi)
IMO/experience/world, not quite true. Around here (kt.com), ideas are cheap, plentiful, and sometimes even distracting. I got a million of ‘em. And more every day. At last count, 52 different notebooks to (try to) capture them all. It’s not the idea. It’s the idea I can put into action all the way through to profitability that’s worth the price of the trigger. I can buy books and generate ideas infinitely faster than I can act on any of the ideas I generate. OTOH, I can act on ideas a whole lot faster than I can win the PowerBall.
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Canning pears
August 10th, 2008
It’s pear season now. I have two trees; one is bearing and one is a dud, a child of a wonderful pear mother and fly-by-night father that didn’t live up to my hopes. Perhaps mother was grafted, anyway, although it is an old tree. But my bearing pear is bountiful and John’s pruning over the past two years has made it flourish. The spring and summer have been kind to tree fruits this year.
I canned several years ago, and the first year had some success. The next year, I cut corners (didn’t peel) and lost half my jars to mold. That put me off until this year, when the pruning brought the pears closer to picking range, I had John’s help and a good ladder, and I didn’t have to settle for windfalls which are often completely bruised before I can pick them up.
We took inventory of my canning supplies last night and a late trip to WalMart filled in the gaps with a new canning funnel and a steamer rack. A pear corer would have been a nice addition, but that’s asking a bit much of even a Super WalMart in a small town. I was tickled to learn that my apple peeler works very well on picked pears; windfalls are usually too soft and the prongs simply spin in the middle of the fruit instead of turning it against the peeling blade.
Every ag agent in the country, it would seem, has a publication about home canning, and there is some disagreement about the value of cane sugar to the process. They all agree that Splenda doesn’t have sugar’s preservative qualities, but a number of sites go on to say that the sugar simply keeps the fruit firm and doesn’t contribute to the shelf life of the product. I am not completely sure this is true. I thought that sugar had its own antibacterial properties, in addition to the fact that the concentration of the solution itself inhibited bacterial growth. But I am not a food scientist.
We decided that using a Splenda-sweetened syrup with lemon juice, heating the fruit first, and then steam canning for the length of time recommended for cold pack, was an adequate compromise. If you learn we have died of botulism, take heed and do not try this at home.
Finding our way into a routine of peel-and-prep, wash and sterilize, and steam, repeat, that worked for two people with different kitchen styles was a somewhat bumpy process, but by the end of the second batch, we were much smoother. Could have gone on all day, almost, but we were out of pears. A thunderstorm in the middle of the day helped cool off the kitchen, which in turn made the work much more comfortable.
Canning feels good. I am not sure I will save any money, by the time I account for the gas and electricity, and lids, and late night trip to the store. I feel better to know I can feed myself off my own property. One of the charms of this house is a set of shelves in the basement custom-built for ball jars. There is probably room for 1000 jars. The original owners gardened and kept their family fed most of the year. I have restocked the ball jar collection that once lived on those shelves, and now 20 are full again for the winter.
Next year, we will plant tomatos. (Do goats eat tomato plants?) I have read Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, and listened to In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s time to shift the garden back to production.
There are another 40 quarts of pears in the tree, and the next time we do this, we will fall into our rhythm more quickly. The grapes are starting to ripen, and maybe there will be a fig crop this year, too. At least I don’t have to think about zuchini.
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Inventory Management
August 10th, 2008
When people visit my studio during the annual Studio Tour, I tend to hear comments like, “Where do you get all your ideas?” When I visit other artists’ studios, I ask, “How do you store all your stuff?” I imagine that painters have it “easy,” all they have to worry about is a few tubes of paint and they don’t take up much space. (Completed canvases, OTOH, are a whole ‘nother matter.) One welder envied me when I said my dead art rotted away (in the days when I was more actively chainsaw carving). He couldn’t get rid of steel that easily.
I discovered a cute little garden art project last week; a new way to make bird baths and bird feeders out of cold glass available in the yard sale and thrift shop market. Beautiful stuff. And so I’ve been acquiring raw material. It’s a quiet Sunday night and I took out my “parts” and my new tube of glue and was all ready to start assembling, thinking I had everything I needed, but what I have simply doesn’t sing yet. I have enough “parts” for four or five bird feeders, but it turns out I will have to accumulate enough parts for 20 in order to get four or five good ones. And then I’ll sell three and keep everything on hand for another four years.
At least glass doesn’t rot, and if I get some plastic storage bins, I can keep the parts in the basement.
This is not the case for the raw fabric I use in my rugs, which is spilling out from under my work table and threatening to overtake my sewing room if I don’t get a few hours of slicing in soon. Several rugs ago, I got a little low on “slice,” and I can tell that for a brief interlude, the depth of color in the rugs that I pulled during that period was less than I really like.
For some artists, it’s all in the inventory. Debbie New was quoted in KnitKnit saying that “the way you choose to arrange your yarns (stash, aka inventory) exerts some influence on what you choose to make with them.” (p. 147) To me, that is the most important sentence in the book. I need stash on hand; I need variety, I need to be able to choose among a number of options and have the best one on hand. Raw material for my rugs is not found in any store, and living where I do, one plans trips to town carefully, anyway. The same is true when I make furniture, or carve. I need to have the “stuff” here, available, to hand. The material itself makes some of the decisions.
My art inventory is bursting out of the seams of this house. I contemplate a storage shed, or perhaps moving a small (12×60?) mobile home into the backyard. For textiles, it would need to be heated space, I’m afraid, and then the county has an opinion about what I can do.
Some art forms cost approximately $100 to get into, and others start at $1000 (welding), and it appears that my glass birdbath idea is at least in the $100 range. I’m in it for $45 at the moment, so I shouldn’t expect too much.
Stay tuned. This is a tiny salvo in a much larger problem; idea management is just as much an issue. Maybe I’ll figure it out one of these days, and until then, I can only hope I don’t die suddenly. The stuff piled up really is raw material that will become art in the foreseeable future, as opposed to useless and tragic accumulation and hoarding, but it’s possible that not everyone would understand the difference.
Posted in Making Art, Uncategorized | Comments (1)
Marianne Kinzel’s Springtime Tea Cloth Shawl, part 3
August 7th, 2008
Back from the trip and the shawl is well underway. 3/5 complete, actually. Here are my in-progress notes, scrawled in airports and hotel rooms between here and Orcas Island and back.
Cast on at RDU while waiting for our flight to Atlanta. John went to buy a shoe shine, one of my rules for flying if I’m wearing leather shoes and always a good idea in cowboy boots (him, not me, who was travelling in Keene sandals). The plan is to cast on 8 sections of 29 stitches. Fortunately, I checked the pattern after the first two were complete; the second count shows that section B starts with 30 stitches. My markers are split and can be moved. This is good.
Later, I discover that I should have cast on extra (two stitches) for sections A at each end of the shawl, and at the outside point, but it takes several rounds before this becomes apparent. While I am casting on, I cannot think of how I will “knit back” and start the second side of the pattern, but I trust that I have done this before and so somehow, it will work out. Cast on the length of the starting V and knit six sections in pattern before boarding, and before we reach Atlanta, I finish the rest of the top of the V (the inside corner) and start back along the lower edge (outside). I have picked up one loop in each cast on stitch onto a second needle and knit in pattern, adding additional markers for the second side of the shawl. After one row in pattern has been knit on each side of the cast row, it’s like flying to make a circuit in knit stitch, and I’m on my way.
The flight from Atlanta to Seattle is long, and I have time to realize I am in a muddle but by the time I understand what’s going on, I have too much completed (three or four pattern rows, not counting the knit rows in between) to want to rip back and start over. It’s lace. It will work out. I need labels–paper tags on strings–to tell me where I am within the collection of markers. Which ones mark the four corners, which the inside decreasing V, and which the outside increasing V? Plan a stop at Staples Office Supply. At this point, I’m knitting on two circular needles and its clear that I’m having trouble at the ends of the V. I’m getting that gappy space where I change needles, and it’s possible that it won’t go away. Recognize a need for short dpns so that I can knit the ends square, and look to the phone book for knitting stores in the Seattle area. Feel a bit miffed that I did not carry my new Knitter’s Shop Finder with me.
The first store doesn’t open until 11 and because we’re still on EDT, we’re out of the hotel early and arrive at 9:15. We head over to Acorn Street Shop where the owner is just setting the sale baskets outside but is not yet open for business, which gives me time to find a ballroom dance skirt in the U District that will be perfect for hoop performance. Back to Acorn Street, and I come away with #4 dpns as well as an Addi Turbo Lace circular needle, expensive at $16 but project-saving now that I’ve discovered one of my bamboo needles has a nick that makes it hard to move knitting from the cable onto the needle. (This is not all I buy, by the way, and it becomes clear very quickly that were I to live in the PNW, I would be knitting sweaters and shawls all the time. That is a subject for a different post.)
Between Seattle and Yakima, our final destination that evening, I get the various turning points labelled, and correct the cast-on mistakes at the ends which requires adding a lot of stitches to bring the V-end leaves up to the width they should have been, had I started right. I don’t think you can tell. Somewhere in the next day, I have enough depth at the turn so that I don’t need the dpns anymore, making their purchase a bit of an extravagance, I suppose. However, they helped me see what was happening at the ends of the V and get back on track with the pattern, and that might not have happened if I’d stayed on the circular needles only.
My notes simply point out that the transition between the first and second rounds of B was rough, and that I had to wing it at several points, especially the outside corner of the V. At some point along the way, I settled on working a yo k3tog yo at the inside V which allowed both halves of the lacy triangle to flow together smoothly. There may have been one or two k5tog before I figured this out. Somewhat similarly, the difference between the top of the lacy point inside two leaves at the center of the B motif, and the solid triangle at the top of the A motif (used as the end cap on the first round, I think) was not always obvious, and therefore the transition may not be as uniform as it could have been. Other knitters may have ripped back. I am not that kind of knitter.
Another thought that crossed my mind somewhere along the way: I wasted a lot of energy doing the slip2 knit2 pass sso in the first pattern row, twice for each motif. Because you will do this on each side of the cast on row, you are essentially bunching up 4 cast ons into one nobbin of lace. It would have been much easier, and just as effective for the pattern, to cast on one and then knit one at that point, keeping the yos in pattern. I write this as if I may knit this pattern yet again, with some other modification. This, too, is a subject for another blog post.
The first ball of yarn ran out at row 8 (16 if you count the knit rows) in the second round of the motif. Before long, I had to make a decision about knitting three rows of the leaf motif (B), or stopping at two, going on to patterns C and D, and then possibly having an extra skein of the fiber left over. Not enough, or too much? Hard choices. I don’t like this colorway quite enough to want something else in it, and I’m a fan of larger shawls rather than smaller. Counting on my scanned picture and assuming all rows are equal in the pattern (risky, in a pattern that increases each row), I calculated that I had completed 20 (first row) + 2/3 24 (8 rows into a 12 row pattern) = 16 motifs, or 36 complete motifs. The third row would have 28 repeats of the pattern, so I should be able to complete it, plus 1/3 24 (4 rows of a 12 row pattern) = 8 for a total of 28+8=36, with the next skein of yarn. That leaves one skein each for the C row (32 motifs, but 100% lace no leaves, which maybe uses less yarn?) and one for D, at 36 motifs, but only 10 pattern rows.
We arrived back in Raleigh as I knitted out the very last bit of the second skein and closed out the final knit row of the third repeat of B.
I want to try more of Marianne Kinzel’s patterns in the round (or more accurately, “in the V”), presuming this V shawl works the way I expect it to. I have to get back to my 2-stitches to the inch rug knitting. I don’t know when I will finish the shawl. It feels hot in my hands here on the east coast. It never felt the least bit warm in the PNW. Essentially, I knit for every possible knitting moment in eight days of travel and visiting, and I did not bore, get tired, or want to stop. I could be knitting right now.
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Marianne Kinzel’s Springtime Tea Cloth, part 2
July 27th, 2008
Sketched and thought and traced and sketched and woke up this morning and knew that “cut and paste” was the only answer. Scan the picture from page 87 of Marianne Kinzel’s First Book of Modern Lace Knitting. Start cutting out little squares, and rectangles, according to how I think it should knit up, and taping them onto another sheet of paper. I don’t exactly “get no where,” but I certainly am not happy with what I’m getting. I can’t convince myself that the squares in the middle of the point are going to knit correctly. In my mind, the “leaves” should align, but they’re not aligning on paper and they may well not align on the needles, either. Breakfast intervenes.
While reading the paper, my knitting thinker reorganizes the problem. I’m starting with a single point. I need to rethink what the pattern actually does, given my design requirement of starting from the middle and knitting rounds on a circular needle. Reprint the scanned picture because there isn’t enough left to cut it up again.
This time, I sketch out the problem in squares only, counting rounds. Whatever I wind up designing, I need the same number of squares above and below the cast-on line so that the project will knit on circular needles. In the meantime, I have swatched 29 stitches on bamboo #4 needles, in rows of garter stitch. Gauge isn’t terribly important. To quote Ms. Pearl-McPhee, “how can a shawl not fit?” but I want some reasonable understanding of how many squares it will take to make each half of the triangle. 29 stitches in garter stitch stretch out to 6″; that’s good enough.
(Incidentally, the TSA recommends bamboo needles when flying, and the gauge question is set. My only “good” bamboo needles are #4; Earl or Baker the cat chewed on my #8 and they’ll never knit lace again.)
Out come the colored pencils and I’m counting squares and rows and thinking about where the end-of-row turns happen, and I see I don’t have to do anything special at the ends. The corner-turning repeat is written into the pattern for the straight rows, outside the * section that gets repeated. (Buy the book if this is not making sense. It’s only $8 from Dover today.) This time, when I go to the cut-and-paste, I cut long rows of the designed pattern part rather than individual squares, and the pattern comes together much better. Outside corners happen automatically, between the “end bits” of the B chart and one unit of the A chart. Inside corners are harder. I will have to look at the chart carefully to make sure what I’m thinking of knitting there will actually work. Cast on 29*4*2: four squares on each arm of the shawl; 29 stitches for each square center unit of part B (in between the *-*).
I am not tons o’happy about the change in pattern up the center back, but I can play with that now that I have a plan. Similarly, I think it might be possible to substitute an openwork square at the ends of each arm, instead of the triple-flower filler edged by two doubles that’s there now. But maybe not. It’s Sunday afternoon and we take off Wednesday and it’s still Release Week at my dayjob and likely, there won’t be a whole lot of free time. Only knitters will even question the design, not anyone who simply sees the shawl.
I don’t know if I’ll knit the edging as written, or skip the C chart and go straight to D. Depends on how big the shawl is by the time I get there, which is in part the relationship between garter stitch measured on the needles and the actual lace stitch as worked.
Enough for today. Need to get outside and pick bagworms off the cypress trees. Silly me for thinking I got all of them last year and I didn’t have to spray in May to keep them away this year.
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Marianne Kinzel’s Springtime Tea Cloth, Again
July 26th, 2008
Here I go again. I have 1000 patterns within reach. I am, after all, on the internet. I belong to Ravelry, although I can’t remember my password today. The world of knitting is at my feet. And I am about to start knitting Marianne Kinzel’s Springtime Tea Cloth pattern, again. This will make the third? fourth, if you count the baby blanket that had to be abandoned to a miscarriage, time. I knitted six miles of crochet cotton into a tablecloth in this pattern for my brother’s wedding present (and finished it before their first baby arrived, natch). And I look through all my patterns and everything I can find on the web, and decide to go it one more time.
The design problem: facing a cross-country flight and significant driving on the other end, I need something small and portable. While rug knitting is portable, it does not travel well, especially by plane. It is bulky, works up quickly, and weighs a lot. I’d need a whole ‘nother suitcase to keep me in yarn for a week, and I’d have to mail the finished units home to myself. Meanwhile, I have a large number of lace weight alpaca-merino skeins, a gift from my mother, that have been waiting for a project. 1600 yards fits into one hand and weighs about half a pound. This is travel knitting fiber.
But what to knit? Four skeins in “Sunrise,” a pink-mauve variagated colorway. All the flat knitting lace patterns have purl return rows, and I don’t want to spend half my time purling. I could knit a circular shawl on round needles, but you have to wear circular shawls doubled over and that’s wasting half your yarn right there. In this climate, you don’t need to wear anything doubled over, anyway. Flat knitting, in the round, to make a retangular shape. Hmmmm….
Marianne’s pattern for Springtime shows a square, which would make a shawl easily enough, but then you have the varigation problem. If you start with a tiny number of stitches (4) and increase each row, the way the color flows off the skein changes markedly as you move toward the edges of the shawl. It’s better if you can start with something approximately the same width all the way across, and then at least you get the same self-striping as the work progresses. Hard to do with a square started in the middle. (Shawl knitters know that starting a square at an edge gives you a non-stretchy cast-on / cast-off edge problem.)
For my brother and SIL’s tablecloth, I made a rectangle. Can’t think of how I started it at this very moment, but I recall inserting a number of motifs into the initial cast-on so that instead of working around and around in a square, the knitting grew into a rectangular, dinner-table shape. It worked. (A day later, the memory returns: Cast on one A, then as many B as you need to get a good way down the table, then another A, and then start knitting the second row of B into the cast on stitches. Two motifs will grow out of one repeat of cast on stitches.) If I start in the center of a rectangular shawl shape, I can grow the motifs out as far as I think my yarn will take me and then be able to finish off the project before I run out of the color. Both ends of the shawl will match, pattern-wise, which is not the case with her shawl pattern “Arabesque” (Book Two).
I have not even finished this post, let alone found needles or cast on, and I’m thinking about whether I can modify the cast-on to give me a “V” or triangular shape. Purely rectangular shawls have a “bunching up” problem around the neck and shoulders which is solved, in part, by a triangle. Hmmm… Need to sketch this out. I know I can do the rectangle and the pattern is written to create beautiful squared corners automatically. If I do a V, I’ll have to write an increase on the outside point and a decrease on the inside, and I don’t know if I can do that between now and take-off and have it work out.
But this is a gridded pattern, which isn’t any different in essense from my log cabin rugs, and I ought to be able to let the pattern write itself. Out comes the tracing paper, and I outline the basic shape of the shawl. Don’t have time at this moment to develop the pattern all the way out, but I see the next steps from here. It will work. I think.
Need to run. Good to have at least some of the problem figured out.
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Frustrated Frugality
July 26th, 2008
I can, in some cases, be exceedingly careful and frugal with my money; not all the time or I’d be considerably more well-off. I scrimp and am careful and set the thermostat at 80 in the summer when I’m in the house by myself, and 67 in the winter. I save the clean water that runs while it gets hot and use it somewhere else, which saves 30 gallons a month on a bill that charges in increments of 1000 gallons. I saved spare change and increased my downpayment on my own home by 1.5%, enough to put me in a different category for PMI. Etc.
And then the lid caves in on the septic tank in my rental property, and I discover it’s possible to spend $1500 before 9 AM on a Monday morning. It’s not often one does that, outside of making investments in the stock market (which actually can’t close until the market opens). House closings don’t start that early. Stores that sell expensive merchandise don’t open that early. Car dealers aren’t open before 9 AM, and in this town, not on Sundays, either. The repair person showed up with a backhoe at 6 AM and the new tank was delivered at 7 and a good bit of the dirt was pushed back by 9 and I signed the check and they all left. I suppose I could offer the fill dirt for sale, but not until the earth pushed into the old tank has thoroughly settled, and it takes a LOT more dirt than I have on hand to make up a $1500 bill.
Looking back, it may have been possible to prevent this problem, possibly. The last owner of the house told me where she thought the tank was. We took her word for that and carefully avoided parking on that part of the yard. She was wrong. The current tenant has parked everywhere BUT where we thought the tank was, including where the tank actually was, and eventually, the lid cracked, taking enough of the tank with it to prevent repair by replacing just the lid. An entirely new tank, taking up a huge section of the yard and now necessitating relocation of the carport (one of those $600 aluminum roof-only structures), was the only solution.
There is no cheap fix for a broken septic tank. There is no DIY solution, either. The only answer is writing big checks to people who have access to and know how to use big equipment. I am practicing gratitude, for knowing plumbers who return calls, and who in turn know the guys that can replace septic tanks, who in turn can show up ready to work at 6:00 AM on a Monday morning, even if that means they’re operating a backhoe before I have a chance to mark the gas line. I can try more gratitude for its being July, so the gas was not flowing at the time the backhoe sliced through the line.
I don’t want to say “now I’ve replaced every system in that house,” because it’s still running on its first central air conditioning unit. But when I read David Giffels’ All the Way Home, I could identify. It’s never done. And there’s only so much money you can save.
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Finding a Way In
July 10th, 2008
Piano, polymer clay, rugs, carving, painting, and now perfume? I just finished reading The Perfect Scent, by Chandler Burr, and recommend it to anyone who’s interested in either perfume or professional creativity. The book is a documentation of the creative process, at least as expressed through a commercial product. It’s hard to find artists who can speak clearly about how they get from idea to finished product; the big decisions that get made early and the increasingly constrained and refined adjustments along the way; the contribution of deadline and budget to the final product; the changes in thinking and ability that occur across a lifetime. Personally, I ponder why and how I can follow the same path—idea to finished product—effortlessly for some media, and not at all for others.
My nose does not work very well; I am not likely to pursue a career in perfumery. At my age, professional music is also unlikely, but the keyboard calls. I have been fumbling around for two weeks now and just found what may be a new way into music: http://www.pianofundamentals.com/, a site written by Chuan C. Chang. His book presents a different and to me, unintuitive approach to practicing piano. There are other books that teach approaches to learning, some via chord mastery into playing popular music; others graded lessons designed to advance technical skill in playing classical music. So far, I haven’t seen any that address the mechanics of practice to the extent Mr. Chang does.
My initial take-aways: learn each hand separately, by memorization, and then work on putting the parts together. Study the music and figure out the repeating patterns, and master the hard measures (there are usually a few much harder than everything else) first.
I have given one practice session to this new method, and I came away with an intense headache and a sense that I had made more useful progress than I had in 10 days of mucking about. It could be that the headache was related to the late hour and the pitchers of diet cola product I’d consumed at dinner, but I suspect it was also driven by a different approach to learning, with the sense that it was my neurons screaming “We’ve used up all our neurotransmitters—send more!”
I am forced to confront, again, somewhat reluctantly, the difference between “knowing about” and “knowing,” a topic I’ve written about before and one which will probably dog me my entire life. It’s not too hard to “know about” any particular song, given an arrangement written for “easy piano.” I can bumble through and get reasonably smooth on the tricky places with a few sessions’ attention, and I am also improving in my ability to bumble through initially difficult pieces. But I’m not seeing “polish” or “mastery” or “reliable” anywhere on the music horizon.
I suspected memorization would be a part of the solution, but in Chang’s eyes, it’s at the heart of mastery, not “a part of.” With only 20 minutes invested, I can see how this works. I can sight-read sufficiently well to keep up with an easy-piano arrangement. But I’m not actually LEARNING the intervals, the distances between keys, the sound / intervals. I’m reading and looking ahead and keeping up, just like singing with the radio. (Quick: How much of Hey Jude can you sing without radio backup?) As I played and tried to learn “by heart” the various parts, four or five measures at a time, I heard the music differently, too. “Oh: THERE’S the pattern! Look, it does THIS, and then THAT, and …”
As I said, after 20 minutes I was done. I haven’t gone back to see if the effort “took,” or what I could play today. Will test later. I had the same achy feeling in my head that I got when I went from QWERTY to the Dvorak keyboard layout, something I identified as neurons wrenching themselves into new connections. I imagine, without any real data, that recovering from a stroke must feel something like this. I hope, again without real data, that any significant laying down of new neuronal connections in adulthood provides some protection against Alzheimer’s or other brain aging disorders. Easy to hope and a touch self-serving when my gene pool doesn’t run to that manner of death, however.
So, what does this have to do with perfumery, or painting? It is “a way in.” Music is an enormous art, and I was born with some raw ability. I can sing, but don’t, because I never found a way to connect to the music that suits my throat (contralto) and personality. The guitar is a bridge and I’ll be back to that in a bit, perhaps, as I come to understand what’s going on with chords and keys (scales) and melody. Doesn’t hurt that Bruce Emery is the most accessible writer on music theory I’ve found, and he’s from Raleigh so I’m supporting the local economy when I buy his books.
Let this into my brain; load that table in the “everything I know” database, and see what happens the next time I generate a “give me an idea for art” query.
Possible branches in this essay: Memorization software. Later.
Somehow, I have “the way in” for knitting and fiber etched into my brain. I can’t remember not knowing how to think through what needed to happen to make a textile idea take shape. I have two llamas’ worth of fiber on the porch and it will turn into something. I have never processed raw fiber into yarn, but that doesn’t seem to be any barrier at all. I’ll read a book and talk to some people and I’ll have yarn, or felt, and a finished product, before terribly long.
This does not happen with painting, or polymer clay. I have the materials, and the desire, but somehow the “idea into product” pathway remains obscure. I read the books, subscribe to the magazines, ponder the problem at regular intervals, and make no apparent progress. It’s not a block against “color,” per se, because I have pretty decent mastery over color when it shows up in a yarn. At this moment, I am clueless. Some paths into art are wide and level; others blocked almost completely. (Yet others voluntarily closed off, I should add. Most metals work. Quilting.) Had thought perhaps music was in this category but now it opens.
More to say on this, too, but that’s going to have to wait for another post.
Tags: creativity, learning piano, music
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More Music Shopping
July 8th, 2008
I might have guessed this was going to happen. Now that I own a real piano and am playing with some regularity, sheet music is flowing into my life. Rather, I’m seeing sheet music around me where I was blind to it before. The day after we brought the piano home, I made a special trip to the “music store” to find something I wanted to play besides the Mary Poppins book that came from the thrift shop. Now, there’s music everywhere.
The first additional book was Lord of the Rings for Easy Piano, ordered from an Amazon used bookseller. With media mail, it took a while to arrive. Both the Chatham PTA (thrift shop to benefit the school system) and Habitat ReStore sell sheet music when it is donated; from those stores, I added
· Merry Widow Waltz
· Beauty and the Beast for easy piano (May learn the title song for my niece)
· Les Miserables (don’t know any of these songs but should I ever see the show and decide to learn one or two of them, I’d rather pay $1 for the book than $12.95 in a new music store) (I wonder what the carrying cost of that investment is? Don’t know the “real” financial term.)
· several “school” books of graded lessons for the piano; classical and not on my immediate list but they can age in my collection for another 10 years rather than go to the Mixed Paper recycling bin right away
Tales Resold in Raleigh had several Hal Leonard Essential Songs books in great shape at half-price. With compilations, it can be useful to divide the number of songs I’m likely to actually learn into the price to get a “price per song” value (use the same math on knitting books) and I didn’t need to own all of them. The Movie Songs book came home with me. Some surprises that I didn’t know were “movie” songs:
· For All We Know
· Kokomo
· Somewhere Out There
· Tears in Heaven
· Beauty and the Beast, in a more challenging arrangement than the one in the Disney book I bought at Habitat
(Kokomo is not on my list, and I won’t be able to play For All We Know when John’s around, he not being much of a Carpenters fan.)
Hit major paydirt when I stopped in at Nice Price in Chapel Hill; they had two shelves full of books and individual songs. Now I need to check their store in Raleigh, too…
· Cat Stevens Greatest Hits (no easier than the individual Morning Has Broken, but cheaper, at least)
· Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (fun to play)
· Born Free for easy piano, easier than the version in the Hal Leonard Movie book
· Rhinestone Cowboy (I’m not sure I will ever actually learn this song, but it is interesting to see how it’s put together and for sure, it’s better to learn that for $1 than to have to pay full current price, or even download price.)
· Song from M*A*S*H (ditto on the logic used for Rhinestone Cowboy, albeit this was a much bigger slice of the culture. The lyrics don’t get any better when you can read them undistracted by credits)
· You Are the Sunshine of My Life
What a slice of a life! Of course, there’s no way to know how this music arrived at the store; if it all came from one person or trickled in, donation by donation and subsequently edited by other buyers just as I left some behind (not ready for Eric Clapton’s Greatest Hits yet and I believe I will encounter more of that book in the used book market, a fact I am not ready to believe about Cat Stevens). One day, my collection will arrive at a used book store, presumably, and what will anyone deduce about my tastes in music, documented as they are by what I purchased and not what I actually played?
Tags: piano music
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Pianos
June 22nd, 2008
What a very strange weekend this has turned out to be. We started out Saturday morning with no particular plans, and we find ourselves on Sunday afternoon, in a house filled with new-to-us makers of sound energy, in the form of John’s new mechanical movement grandfather clock and my digital piano. This wasn’t planned. John asked why I hadn’t written all week, and I only just this moment realized that I was waiting on a new piano before I had enough to say.
I did not set out to buy a piano today. I have been thinking about getting one, true. I just finished a set of group lessons on a Casio electronic keyboard I purchased used in Chicago in 1996; it was outdated then. I don’t like it much. If there is a way to control the relative volume on the left hand, I haven’t found it, and the action was difficult. But it is a keyboard, and it was paid for, and I enjoyed playing and learning some music (more on that later). In the course of looking for party couches on craigslist this past month, I noticed the frequent appearance of free pianos, and that made me think maybe I should get a real piano. I even figured out where the piano would go, and what I would do with the furniture that used to be in that place!
Then, I found Perri Knize’s Grand Obsession on the new book shelf in the library. Reading it convinced me that a) I need and deserve a better piano than my Casio keyboard and b) I do not have a life for a real piano. I allow the house to range widely in both temperature and humidity throughout the year and I cannot afford the amount of tuning that a real piano will need, not to mention the potential expense of a “free” piano in terms of any other problems. But I kept my eye on Craig’s List. This morning, I saw an ad for a Kurzweil digital piano at a price that made me suspect it might have been stolen.
Apparently not. Someone is not playing it anymore and thinks that because this model is old it is not of value to anyone (wrong about that), and I was the first to reply to the ad and the owner’s agent honored the posted price. Some of the keys appear to be erratically more quiet than they should be but I am hoping that taking the back off and cleaning the circuits and switches with compressed air may fix that.
Perri spends 350 pages describing the her search for the right piano for her, the effect of a certain quality of vibration on her soul when she finds the piano, and her quest to regain that effect when it disappears after the piano is delivered. I know I have lost a fair amount of hearing in certain frequencies, perhaps to the chainsaw and perhaps to life. I do not know if I am capable of experiencing anything of that nature. (It’s amusing to read the reviews on Amazon and see how many people insist that because they can’t hear the difference in pianos, it is a waste of Perri’s time to pursue her quest, and an even bigger waste of their time to (be forced to) read her story.) I know that when I started to play the Kurzweil and noticed the dynamic range, I teared up. It sounded so much better!
For today, an old digital piano offers more of a real musical experience than a Casio keyboard and that will have to do until something tells me I need more.
As we brought the Kurzweil in from the truck, I thought about Floyd Cramer’s Last Date. I am not sure why I even thought of this music, relative to anything else. But I suspect that thinking of it at that moment means I want to learn this piece. I am not at all sure why I want to learn any particular piece of music, actually, and that’s as much a mystery as finding myself playing the piano at 49 is at all. I know I left piano lessons in my teens over a “school” Bartok piece that made no musical sense to me. My teacher’s pedagogical theory said, “stick to the books” and that was the piece for people at my level in that system, and there we were.
In the group class that just ended, our teacher assigned selections from Mozart’s Twelve Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.” I thought about learning the complete set. For today, I’ll let it go as an intellectual exercise. It would be cool to be able to rip off all twelve. Maybe my niece and nephew would appreciate it. OTOH, I do not have time for “cool.” I am enjoying getting Feed the Birds (Mary Poppins) right; I love some of the sounds and am amazed that I can learn to make those particular sounds reliably. In time, I’ll get all four pages right. In more time, I’ll get all four pages memorized, even.
Back to Cramer. The sheet music is available in two editions, “standard” and “easy.” The page preview at SheetMusic.com looked a bit too easy. I was about to order a copy of the standard version on-line when I thought it might be more fun to check Burrage Music. They list the music in their on-line catalog and I can run by there tomorrow after work. What I save on shipping will about pay for the gas and sales tax, and who knows what else I’ll find as I flip through their collections?
So: What is this thing called “liking a piece of music,” and then what is this thing called “learning?” I’m far enough into Feed the Birds that I’ve lost the stumble memory and just now to the point that I’m recognizing the measures that repeat and vary. Now onto learning something else. Play around a bit with The Sound of Music, but nothing there moves me the way Feed the Birds does (E flat minor, BTW, which is one variable to note; Sherman & Sherman vs. Rodgers and Hammerstein is another). I’m trying to figure this out and there is too little time to work on everything and too many variables to write an equation just yet.
(Wikipedia informs me that the Sherman brothers wrote “It’s a Small World,” proving that they have absolute mastery over writing songs that can drive themselves into your brain.) Is it that TSOM was shown on TV a LOT before I quit watching TV, and Mary Poppins disappeared for a long time so the songs weren’t over-exposed?
Sigh. Perri Knize took 350 pages and years of global travel before she could identify and locate the sounds she intuitively understood she wanted to hear. I’m thinking I’m going to do something similar in a blog post or two?
I went through something similar when I first heard Josh Groban sing, one night in Best Buy when I was shopping for a new TV after my 13” VCR combo died. I was trying to decide between a 13” and splurging on a 19” monitor, and it took me long enough that the NCAA basketball game ended and the TVs turned to MTV, playing the first Groban song to hit the charts. I was mesmerized. On my way out of the store, I stopped by the music department to see if they “had anything by that guy.” They did. I didn’t listen to anything else for a month, and I spent a fair amount of money trying to find the same vocal quality (rich, in less than operatic material) in other artists. Couldn’t. Had to wait for more Josh. (He’s singing a bit higher now than he did in the first album and they don’t stir me quite the same way.)
Maybe I’ll be in Best Buy one of these days soon, now that HD is here for real and I’ll have to do something to make the TV I bought back then (did get the 19” model, BTW) compatible, even if I only ever watch rented DVDs. Maybe someone else will be waiting to move me, or maybe I’ll know / understand more of what it is that I’m looking for.
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