Across the Great Divide

I Hear Johnny Fournote for the First Time.

Johnny Fournote sits near the door I attend, plunking on his guitar. We don't allow canned music to be played inside the Day Center because it fills up a space already overflowing with sound.

There's more tolerance for a human voice singing quietly, or a well-played guitar. In fact, we have several available to use. But if the music's too loud, we send them to the patio or vestibule.

Folks have different tastes, of course, and imposing your music on someone is the same as putting unwanted voices in their heads. Especially here.

Johnny isn't playing a song or even a riff. He's practicing a simple pattern, over and over. [For the musicians reading, it's two pairs of fifths. DDddDDddAD/CCccCCccGC/DDdd... Over and over and over...] 

He played the same thing last time I saw him.

It bugged me then and it's starting to bug me now—in part, because it's so monotonous, and in part, because his picking doesn't swing or express feeling. It's just rote tapping: DDddDDdd...

But nobody else seems bothered, and Johnny is a big guy with a bit of temper, so why provoke him by asking him to go outside when he's calm? Why is the musician in me more important than the demons in him?

And with that question come memories of sitting alone in a basement, playing chord progressions over and over, letting the strings ring out, as if I were swimming stroke after stroke through a circle of sound, hoping to summon an emotion or quiet the one ripping through me so it can be distilled into a song but right now it just comes out as hums and grunts and nonsense scat chasing a melody through the thicket of the chords until I scare loose a line and maybe that flushes out another and still I am thrashing, no idea where I'm going except away from the fugal blackness that brought me here, and now I turn on the recorder in case anything good happens, in case some decent lyrics appear out of nowhere—that way I won't have to stop to write them down and risk breaking the spell—but even if it turns into nothing except good vibrations, I'll be further away from the dark. 

Johnny's playing hasn't changed. It hasn't improved. But my listening has. He's off on a mind-body journey that has nothing to do with me or anyone else within earshot. 

No, nothing to do with me at all.

Understanding Magic.

Gary holds forth for some time as he fingers the house acoustic guitar, a scarred, sixties-vintage Harmony missing a pick guard and patched on the sides and back with two colors of tape. It sounds far better than it looks.

That's one lesson of Peace House: Forget surfaces. Listen.

Gary says he didn't want to practice piano and go over to some old lady's house for lessons when he was a kid, but he was grateful to his parents for insisting. When he was sixteen, he saw Grand Funk Railroad in concert, and that's when he knew he was born to be a musician. For three weeks he begged for a guitar and amplifier until his father gave in, then found a guitar book in the school library.

He instructs as he plays, chording complex songs and running through major, minor, pentatonic and blues scales. He accompanies himself with chatter about flatted thirds and sevenths.

Ty and Roy stare at his hands. It's hard to tell if they get the concepts, which have to travel by a different, slower path through the brain.

When Gary finally hands Ty the guitar, he plays a scale and Gary says, you've got it, but to make music you have to play with feeling. He takes the guitar back and plays another blues lick to illustrate.

Calvin saunters in. Calvin, the Peace House trickster, the Milo Minderbender, the HL Mencken and Spike Lee rolled into one. Sitting next to him in his corner, you hear a running commentary that picks apart everything in the room, like having a translator's earpiece, with jokes.

He begins free-styling to Gary's blues:

    I went to the Peace House just to fill my empty belly

    I went to the Peace House just to fill my empty belly

    If I can't have breakfast sausage I'll eat peanut butter and jelly        

Gary tells the story of a riff he learned in Chicago, written by a stone-cold alcoholic who started his mornings at the door of a liquor store begging for a drop and ended his days dead from drink. The tune grabs, neither strange nor familiar, part-BB King, swirled in a bowl formed of jazz and with a hit of heavy metal. Four men nod in respect toward the nameless man, nothing now but a tune and a story.

Ty quotes Tom Petty. Music is the only real magic. Without substance, yet it moves people.

When Ty takes the guitar, his playing is fluid and his notes bend expressively. 

You were holding out, says Gary. You do know how to play with feeling.

Ty once took violin in sixth grade, the extent of his music instruction.

I can play anything I hear, he says, but I want to understand what I'm doing. 

Shelter Report: What do you get when you mix 8 preschoolers and 1 baritone?

After a long break I returned today to the preschool classroom at People Serving People. A state background check has to be done annually to clear me to provide "direct contact services," and for some reason, it took much longer this time around.

That meant I missed reconnecting with two boys who were part of a field trip I went on in late June. At the time, I told them I'd see them in a week, and one boy said, "remember my name."

I did, but he and his friend are apparently no longer at the shelter. Moving in and out of housing is hard for the kids, of course, but it's also hard for the adults who develop bonds with the children in our classroom. It's an odd conflict: You want to see the the kids each week, but not seeing them may mean their home situation has improved.

This job may not be the right volunteer gig for someone who values closure.

***

An early childhood music instructor from MacPhail Center for Music had been working with the class all week, and I felt lucky to catch her last day.

We use music in the classroom every day but it was fun to watch a professional lead different activities and see how positively the kids responded.

So much of preschool is socializing children and developing skills so they will ready for kindergarten—listening, cooperation, attention span, etc.—and music works very well both for getting them to work together and to shine individually.

For example, with the teacher's help, all eight kids got the opportunity to strum a ukelele, bow a violin and produce big notes on a baritone (the surprise of the day for me). They played a rhythm game using animal-themed castenets, plunked on glockenspiels, drummed on their bodies and performed a song that entailed hand movements and bird sounds.

They did a listening exercise in which the teacher placed objects inside a canister and invited them to identify what was producing the sound when she shook it. We also did a dance together and made sounds that rose, fell or swirled. Handling the various instruments required focus and care; all the kids had fun but took the music seriously.

The activities for the most part held the kids' attention well—one of the primary challenges with any group of four- and five-year-olds. And I could see each activity had a point to it. The kids were learning about dynamics, rhythm, sound characteristics and so on without being "taught a lesson."

As they press on through school, though, students are increasingly expected to evolve into brains seated at desks. Movement and sound and improvisation are redefined as distractions or acting out. Music becomes a specialized subject rather than a general activity and learning modality. 

By the time you reach high school, too bad if you're a kinetic learner or would respond better to a song than to a lecture. You're supposed to sit still, pay attention and be quiet.

The sounds I heard today weren't harmonious in a musical sense, but the accompanying behaviors were. Music instruction doesn't just produce musicians; it helps kids get ready to learn.

Melody Hears the Pitch.

A few weeks ago, I saw this sign on an office door outside the pre-school classroom where I volunteer:

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
― Peggy O'Mara

I'd started a post about how important this insight is, then set it aside because it was too argumentative. I'd aimed it at those who believe there's a "self-esteem movement" in schools that, instead of upholding high academic standards, is filling tiny heads with inflated notions of self-worth and unleashing a generation of self-loving losers.

But as this Chronicle of Higher Learning article spells out, there's little evidence the United States is undergoing a narcissism epidemic.

And the quotation on the door is aimed at parents, not education policy-makers. It speaks not just to parents in a homeless shelter but to all of us.

I thought of that abandoned post today when I read about this moment of revelation when a musician mother heard her adult daughter sing to her for the first time. A daughter she'd named Melody.

"When I was four or five years old I remember you told someone that I didn’t have good pitch,” she said, “so, I didn’t sing, but I always wanted to.”

It turns out Melody was highly attuned to the pitch of her mother's voice.

Shelter Report: I Don't Know When I'm Going Home.

I'm still adjusting to my afternoon shift in the preschool at the shelter, where about half my time is calming kids down so they can take naps and not bother the others who've already made it to sleep.

It's probably good self-training.

Anyway, the routine involves children on blue mesh cots with soft blankies in the classroom with the lights lowered and soothing music playing. For quite some time, we'd been listening to a mix tape heavy on the classical, like Pachelbel's Canon. (Think "Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce...") Today was more folkie.

 

Our role is to enforce the routine. Get the kids down and still, eyes closed, mouths shut. Some kids crash right away. Other fidget, find excuses to get up, and test our resolve for two hours straight. Occasionally, as today, a boy will be all over the place and then 15 minutes before it's time to get up, someone will find the magic combo so he falls dead asleep for half an hour. (I offered to massage his feet, which had the multiple benefits of getting him to focus on his body, calming him and restricting his mobility.)

 

More typically, we are giving back rubs—or as a boy asked me today, "will you pet me?"—to kids who request them. It's quiet, one-on-one time when we're not supposed to be talking, but sometimes conversation is called for.

My first charge went from disruptive to zonked quite quickly. I then moved over to a boy I've mentioned before who, unknown to me, had gotten in trouble that morning for aggressive behavior. He lay pensively on his back, staring at the ceiling. He'd asked me to rub his stomach.

"I don't know when I'm going home," he said.

"Does that worry you?" I asked. (I should have said, "How does that make you feel?")

He nodded.

"Well, you will. And right now, because you're here, I get to see you, and that's good. That makes me happy."

Of course, that was easy to say. I got to go home at 4:45.

*****

The dinner selections I'd prepared for last week were taped to the cabinets. Here are some of the menus, from straightforward picnic fare (brats, pizza, peppers and ice cream) to multi-course feasts (hamburger, steak, pork chops, pasta, pizza, soup, waffles, lettuce and baby cut carrots, and honey.)

 

Shelter Report: A Classroom Rhythm of One's Own.

Last night I was washing a martini glass and my vigorous scrubbing snapped the stem, deeply cutting my thumb and first two fingers. I bandaged them up big—both for protection and as a warning to this morning's classroom not to get too rough with the old man.

Four hours later, they are still attached.

Even though a classroom may have the same mix of kids each week, the tenor may vary. Last week, for example, one of the teachers said, "We have a very angry group today." Today, however, the children listened very well, spoke when they were supposed to speak, and the inevitable one or two who acted out were the least disruptive I've seen in a long while.

Last week, kids couldn't wait in line to wash their hands. This week, virtually the same group did pretty well.

After a period of play with straw, sticks and bricks, one boy spontaneously started cleaning the floor and two others found brooms and joined him. Another boy, upset because there weren't enough brooms, was persuaded he could manage the dustpan instead.

I can tell you, it's not the teachers enforcing this mood. In a class aged 3 to 5, there's no way three adults can fully orchestrate a group of 16 so it maintains its attention consistently or participates fully in activities. (Well, maybe in an Amish summer camp, but not in an urban homeless shelter.)

The class had a rhythm of its own, and it was good.

In Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall described a student who inadvertently captured an expression of the ocean of rhythm in which we are all immersed. He was analyzing a film he'd made of a playground of children and discovered that they all appeared to be moving to a synchronous beat. "[W]e found a tune that fit the rhythm. Then the music was synchronized with the children's play and once synchronized stayed in sync for the entire 4 1/2 minutes of the film clip!"

But there was no music and no beat heard on the playground. "The children were screaming and yelling and laughing and making all the playground noises that children make. Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat which they generated themselves. This did not mean that they were all moving at the same time, just as there are times when different sections of an orchestra are silent." But they did have a "conductor"— a little girl who moved around the most and in effect kept the beat going.

I'm so busy reading to kids, watching for impending meltdowns or directing bathroom traffic between poopers and hand washers, that I may be missing what helps set this mood and keeps it going. Without a videocam and a grad student, I probably never will capture it but I'll try to stay tuned.

*****

I hadn't seen Zionte (all the kid names are changed here) since last November and had assumed she'd moved on with her family. But she was here today along with her little brother, who's new to the class. Zionte was once the younger sibling when she had an older brother in the class, and she was a bit of a terror—but in a bright, funny way—a part her little brother is auditioning for, but there's a lot of competition.

Today, several kids were using the doctor kit to give me a medical check up—heart, lungs, eyes, ears, reflexes, etc. Zionte informed me, "You're going to die."

I figured preschool playtime was not a place for the "we're all going to die" discussion, so I went along with the diagnosis.

"Can you fix me?" I asked. I was pretty confident. After all, 5-year-old doctors have extraordinary healing powers.

"No, you're gonna die. You're going to be under the dirt."

I wonder how many real doctors would be that direct?

Kids are pretty cavalier about death. Last week, we had mass dying on the playground. Many were dropping dead, and kids took turns carrying the bodies to graves, then the dead resurrected and went back to where they could die again. It gave me a nice break from being the zombie who gave shoulder rides.

Zionte came back later and said she could fix me after all.

A green bean in each ear and I was a good as before I washed the martini glass.

Vic Chesnutt: No Sweeter Relief.

Holes in his sweater, fluid in his lungs

The experts say there's things

He should've done better

But instead he's just dying young

– Vic Chesnutt, "Dying Young"

The Christmas Day death of singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, who had been partially paralyzed since a drunk-driving car crash when he was 18, could be spun as a story about chemical abuse, depression or suicide. But at bottom (see his "When the Bottom Fell Out" below), it's a story about health care in America.

If you have a pre-existing condition that requires ongoing treatment, and are a self-employed musician in employer-based system, you're not likely to be enjoying the "greatest health care system in the world."

He spoke at length December 1st on "Fresh Air" about his struggles with the health care system, and in another interview, he said:

I'm not too eloquent talking about these things. I was making payments, but I can't anymore and I really have no idea what I'm going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can't afford. I could die any day now, but I don't want to pay them another nickel.

Back in 1996, a Chesnutt Tribute album called "Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation," helped raise money for his medical bills — and was intended to perhaps goose him out of obscurity so he could make a better living. At the time, he was quoted in a Strib story by Jon Bream about medical insurance for musicians.

"A lot of musicians are living supper to supper" and can't pay for insurance. "It's really scary," said Chesnutt, pop's most prominent paraplegic singer-songwriter. "I was lucky enough: I had a job when I crashed. I was working at Hardee's and at a cotton mill, too. So I'd paid in Social Security for a couple of years and I automatically got Medicaid, which is a great thing. If not, my family would've been starved to death. It would've sucked them dry."

Even thirteen years later, a difficult and obscure artists can't go back to the well for another tribute album. So the greatest outpouring comes too late.

The Russians Love Their Lynyrd Skynyrd, too.

I suppose there is life after Afghanistan. The Soviet Union's nine-year stay ended just over 20 years ago.

The war cost the Soviets about 15,000 lives, and messed up the country's relations with China, the Muslim world and the West, including a trade embargo and boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

They left proclaiming their "internationalist duty" finished and washed their hands of further responsibility for advancing national accord or creation of a broadly based coalition government.

From the looks of the Red Army Chorus singers backing up the Finnish band Leningrad Cowboys, some of them were around in the old days. No question where they'd rather be.

Via WINston smITH (h/t Norwegianity)

One of the Newer (Koff) Songs.

My research leads down some strange and rewarding paths.

Back When I was a Word Man.

This is a test of Typepad's audio player, which in my browser doesn't display as a player in my preview mode. It appears to require a right-click on the box to open the link in a new tab/window. But now that it's posted, a play arrow does seem to appear if you hover over the bar with your mouse.

Word Man