Thursday, June 9, 2011

Tennis Serves From Man with Iron Spine

It's not my fault a teenage girl is on the next court playing tennis. That was a coincidence so don't get any ideas. This was about recording and studying my service game to improve my tennis play.
What I learned is that my spine looks as bad as it feels. I get up every morning and put a stick in my mouth to tolerate the pain of movement. By noon I can move and by 4pm I am crippled again. Only heavy doses of Pink Floyd keep me alive and only teenage girls with excellent two handed backhands keep me returning to the tennis court.


Lightning Flash

Nothing special except I was only out there for ten seconds and the lightning toasted my bread. If I had been hit this video would've been much better. I wouldn't make a good combat photographer. Watching this again I see the lightning and thunder are on top of each other. that bolt was the closest of the whole storm and it happened in that one second I was peeking around the roof. Like I timed it.



Ray Bryant RIP

I thought Oscar Peterson was the pinnacle of soulful piano improv and then I was stuck in traffic in Boston listening to a concert by Ray Bryant and everyone was honking at me because I was sitting there with my mouth catching flies as this roar of blue notes was coming at me uncontrollably and attacking my brain leaving me worn by the heartache of the ages. Oh, Time, you Thief of Lives, you rob the old to give to the young!

Ray Bryant playing a grand piano with conviction. He was a musical internet before computers, literally growing up with 5o years of music, spreading the music, composing music, a repository of musical traditions and we are losing that because people don't need to learn anything since the internet remembers it for them. There was a time when the chords to Ain't Misbehaving were known only to a select group of holy musicians. They had a big responsibility that Steve Jobs has made redundant.

His catalog is gigantic so get busy listening to his music. He played "Georgia On My Mind" and it was like I'd never heard it before.

There is advertising before the video because someone disrespects Ray Bryant's talent and wants to make 5 cents off his stride piano runs. I profit only in proximity to this master. Ain't it true that everyone gets rich off the black man's heart body and soul except the black man? I'm still grateful for the chance to see him play here and the driven repeated notes at :27 almost made me drive off of Storrow Drive into the Charles River. He should've had a personal videographer follow him around everywhere. His music should be played in tents to heal the sick. Listen! This music isn't redundant.


Ray Bryant - Blues No. 6 by Delta_Mike

Final chance for hippie to ignore your advice

The train is about to depart the station. My work on the seacoast is finished. I'm only burning through savings by supporting Philbrick's Fresh Market produce manager's ludicrous prices by staying here. I was tempted to take a job delivering car parts for Napa but one must have priorities. There are several organic farm internships I'm interested in more over in Maine and Vermont. These are all alternate plans to my wolf expedition. I have enough money to survive. How far north I will go remains to be seen. There are limits to everything and I recently read that the entire 1300 mile road to Happy Valley is gravel with intermittent pavement. That means dust and broken windshields and broken headlights. I need to get a headlight at a junk yard as a spare. The trip up the Alaskan Highway was mostly gravel and packed dirt in 1989. Our windshield got smashed but we made it. This road into Labrador is less traveled but the trucks probably leave a wide wake. But that's what makes it special. It's not a road people drive often. And there is no other way to see those places for a few hundred dollars. So, the time is now.
This computer is slowly falling apart. The internet has surpassed the abilities of 448 Mb of ram. I can't edit a photo let alone a video. I don't see how I can post anything from Canada if there is no internet, no electricity and no video editing device. And I would prefer to adopt the lifestyle of my evangelical friend outside of Quebec City who ruled over his car scrap yard during the day and cut lumber at night and went to church on Sunday and killed chickens on Saturday to eat. The internet and it's legion of demons hold no sway over Msrs. LaChance. Considering the amount of influence we individually have over the internet it's relatively meaningless whether we interact with it or not...as far as the internet is concerned. Food and shelter are the two words I keep repeating to myself. If you can secure food and shelter than you are a fully functioning animal. Everything else is pure propaganda from the mini skirts and silk cravats to the spiderman underroos and eye liner and Kindle reading aids. It's all propaganda and cultural filigree.

So, I'll be taking my 1974 Vespa Ciao with me because the possibility of breaking down in the middle of the gravel wilderness makes me want to have an alternative. I'll ride that thing over muddy roads to find a water pump for the van. Or my butterfly wing cufflinks may take flight again and allow me to cliff dive from the ledge of my self loathing narcissism. The updraft of the wolf spirit will carry me home to the land of the muskox and snow rabbit.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.