I haven’t posted much lately, partly because not much has been going on that would be interesting to write about, and partly because I’m probably going to shut the blog down and rethink it. I may not, also; I may work on something in the background and the “flip the switch” when the new project is ready. But it’ll probably change before long up in here. Continue reading
I continue to notice little changes that I attribute to my meditation practice. Good ones. My current practice revolves around mindfulness, the attempt to just be aware of and notice thoughts as they happen. When you get into semantics, this is usually considered at least a notch or two down from concentration, where you intend to more absolutely control what goes on in your head. Mindfulness doesn’t attempt to do anything other than return the focus of the mind back to what’s going on in the present, right here, right now, and for a chronic overthinker for myself it’s a really liberating process. It’s a little weird – Zen masters like Nishijima and even Brad Warner have written anti-mindfulness rants, so there’s something about the notion that’s anti-Buddhist to some Buddhists. But my favorite guides to mindfulness are from different sects and it would be difficult to describe zazen without introducing some element of mindfulness, so your karma-mileage may vary. In any event, the word “mindful” has become loaded in a Zen context, and I’m just a guy trying some things out to see what works. Continue reading
Over Christmas, we watched 4 dogs for a friend. (And her parakeet.) I have 4 dogs already. That makes 8 dogs. That’s a whole lot of dogs. The Danish person and the little girl are sort of givens in this house, and they weren’t unusually difficult over the holidays. Probably. I had 4 extra dogs and a bird around here, so I might not have noticed anyway.
I was a little scared of it, but my house is big enough and we’ve got decent, walled-off space outside for them to play, and the neighbors on both sides have dogs that bark at least as much as ours, so as long as things were reasonably under control – which they were – it wasn’t going to generate any controversy. The 4 extra dogs were in pairs, 2 little mini-dogs (Bijou and Marley), sort of Wiener-dog mixes, and 2 maxi-dogs (Shush and Tiger) that were bigger than any that live with us, hovering around 100 pounds. Continue reading
One of my wife’s friends sent us a Christmas card that said something like “May the coming year bring lots of changes.” It sounded disturbingly close to a Chinese curse that goes something like, “May your future be filled with change.” (I’ve read that this is actually a mistranslation or interpretation of another subtle Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Ouch. Too late.) Continue reading
I don’t really get complimented much on music, ever. Which is fine, I’m not fishing for anything, and I sort of walked away from the compliment-drawing world when I moved toward being a jazz musician anyway. Heh…
Just read one of the nicer things I’ve seen written about me on Peter Breslin’s blog, Stochasiticactus, and I don’t know if he or Dave Wayne wrote it, but in a description of Dave’s recent projects, I’m referred to as “the jaw-droppingly great keyboardist Robert Muller.” That’s one for the archives.
One of the only other ones that’s stuck in my mind was an email from a stranger that described a piece of music I’d done as “a mindblowing landscape of funk,” I’ll probably have that put on my business cards at some point like when Wile E. Coyote puts “genius” on his.
I got back from Alaska last Monday evening, the trip was great. The music went well, I loved travelling with everyone I was with.
After our first gig, a guy came up to me, Larry Mitchell and Howard Cloud. I’m 6′0″ and the shortest of the group, and the guy says, “First, I’d like to say that you all look a lot bigger in person than you did on that stage. Wow!”
He was a nice guy, Terry, and he’d enjoyed the music and came over to chat. He looked first at Larry and said something like, “You – you’ve got that funky… Larry Graham… cool guitar stuff up in there.” He turns to Howard and says, “And you, you’ve got some Brothers Johnson stuff going on and…” he holds his hands up and makes bass-slapping gestures. I eagerly await my turn, and he turns to me and says, “You, you’re a white guy, and you come from wherever you came from.”
We all sort of freeze with an awkward half-smile and I think I say “uh, thanks?” We busted up about it later. If it was a compliment, it was pretty hard to decipher. If it was a backhanded insult, it was also pretty unclear, because at the end of the day, I am white, and I do come from wherever I come from.
I’ve been sleeping outside lately. I’ve never done it much before, but the weather has been so beautiful and tempting that I got a cheap tent on my birthday. Initially I had it set up inside the skeleton of my half-complete garage so my daughter and I could play in it, which we did, but in order to get some sleep, I’d need to get serious and put some pegs in the ground somewhere and whatnot. So it’s set up right outside my bedroom. Continue reading
I had a rehearsal in Albuquerque, the first with Joy Harjo and her band, and it was fun. As I was picking up my last load of equipment, I hopped up the low stage, maybe 2 and a half feet, but I didn’t see the lip around the bottom. My sandal caught under the lip, and that mashed my toes into the stage as though I’d kicked it as hard as I could. The followup trip and BOOM onto the stage looked a little dramatic, but I played it off like nothing happened and stoically loaded my last equipment into my car. I sat in the drivers seat for a second and when I grabbed the 3 middle toes on my right foot, “something warn’t right,” and pain shot up my neck. I’d broken at least one toe again, I do it at least once a year. Continue reading
I’ve been accused by those close to me to be occasionally… well, dark. Downright cynical even. This is not new, and it doesn’t bother me. I definitely have a pessimistic streak, but it’s not overpowering; I’m definitely not a pessimist, I just don’t think every cloud has a silver lining. Continue reading
