three hour tour

Yesterday I sailed the seven seas – or at least a couple of square miles on San Francisco Bay – on a reasonable facsimile of a realio-trulio Pirate Ship. Ok, so it was a school field trip with my fourth-grade daughter’s class. There was no rum, no pillage, precious little mayhem. But terms like avast […]

Yesterday I sailed the seven seas – or at least a couple of square miles on San Francisco Bay – on a reasonable facsimile of a realio-trulio Pirate Ship.


_web_images_graphics-banners_hawaiian-chieftain.jpg

Ok, so it was a school field trip with my fourth-grade daughter’s class. There was no rum, no pillage, precious little mayhem. But terms like avast and belay were heard without a trace of irony.

The boat in question (the hawaiian chieftain) is one of a pair of historically accurate reproduction of 18th century sailing ships run by Gray’s Harbor Historical Seaport; they spend the year sailing the west coast and doing various educational and training cruises, wintering in southern CA, and spending summers someplace in washington.

I was, from the moment we boarded, green with envy. These people – mostly college students, with a few crusty old salts – work long hours, get payed little, and live full time on the ships, if in considerably more comfort than we’d have seen two hundred years ago (flush toilets, and food without so many maggots and weevils; the good things about modern technology). They do this ’cause they love the sailing, I guess, and because how else in this day can you call yourself a pirate and actually put in on your curriculum vitae?

I was all for joining up with then and there. I could hang with a year sailing; forget all this fucking high tech.

Alas, my three hour tour was just that, and I had at the end of the day to collect my truck-load of kids and return them to school. Yet I’ve spent the last 24 hours thinking about jibs and spars, about working aloft in the rigging, about what it’d be like to have land feel odd under my feet. Even if it’s play, I wanted to go do it. Call it my version of the old run off and join the circus fantasy.

So of course I looked at the crew openings page. Because the world needs more sailors and fewer engineers, sez I.

Wicked Tinkers

Ok, now we done with our once-a-year foray into irishness? Alright then. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpUdpZpVX3w&hl=en]

Ok, now we done with our once-a-year foray into irishness?

Alright then.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpUdpZpVX3w&hl=en]

smoke and fire and a dearth of sleep

I’m getting bored with bitching about how swampped I am. And I bet you are already clicking away, thinking, oh, sure, another whine-whine-i’m-so-fucking-busy-i-can’t-blog-apart-from-blogging-about-being-busy entry. Fair enough. Thing is, I keep making the mistake of thinking – and saying, in some cases – it’ll be better after this week. Which it isn’t. I was pretty damn […]

I’m getting bored with bitching about how swampped I am. And I bet you are already clicking away, thinking, oh, sure, another whine-whine-i’m-so-fucking-busy-i-can’t-blog-apart-from-blogging-about-being-busy entry.

Fair enough.

Thing is, I keep making the mistake of thinking – and saying, in some cases – it’ll be better after this week. Which it isn’t. I was pretty damn sure after my LA trip last month that things would start to quiet down; the project we’re working on is just about to finish (no, it won’t get announced at some upcoming show, we’re back to working on system internals, nothing so splashy as last time). I figured the night-and-weekend, no-time-to-think-or-talk thing was about over, that I’d have time to take a lunch break or plau hookey for an afternoon any day now.

Of course I was wrong; while the project is closing out soon, this has been one of those moving target games, where ‘about three weeks’ is always out about three weeks from any value of now. And we’ve got two more projects spinning up in the next week or so (“oh just little ones, they’ll be quick,” the teams are saying. Sure. Riiiiight.)

And of course, I just got pulled into some planning on longer terms stuff; projects I am VERY INTERESTED IN, yet don’t have bandwidth to think about yet. I’m so busy bailing I can’t even visualize building a new boat.

Add to that my boss leaving my team (which means I’m having to step in and catch all the balls and clubs and rings and chainsaws he’s been juggling, in effect picking up a new job on top of my old one), and my main co-worker leaving for the rest of the month for a (well deserved) trip home to ethiopia, and I’m looking at a solid month of saying i need a fucking vacation. Which I don’t have time or dough for, at least not out as far on the horizon as I can see from here.

My head will now explode. Stand Back.

The one thing I’ve managed to do is some cooking; even with working most of the weekend, paying my bills, tending my mother, and driving kids around to various play dates and teen birthday parties, I managed to make both a dinner of grilled, mint-and-yogurt marinated lamb with artichokes saturday, and tonight, what turned out to be the best tomato soup I’ve ever had (courtesy of a tyler florence recipe).

I’ve said it before; when everything seems like it’s comin’ down around your ears, try cooking something. If you don’t have time for therapeutic rough sex, smoke and fire and knives is the next best thing (though, you know, sex that includes smoke, fire and knives? That sounds pretty damn good.)

Now I’ve distracted myself. I was going to post recipes, one for roasted tomato soup with bacon, and another marinated lamb. But instead I’m imagining the sort of thing I need a lot more brainpower to describe. That, possibly, will be my next entry. But I’m finding writing erotica isn’t so easy when one’s fighting several weeks of sleep deficit.

The Bad Plus

I meant to post this two weeks ago and as usual, the sheer load of stuff I need to do got in the way. I’m in the final two weeks of getting a project out and… well, nevermind, I don’t wanna talk about work. Let’s just say, busy with a side of busy. Anyway, I’m […]

I meant to post this two weeks ago and as usual, the sheer load of stuff I need to do got in the way. I’m in the final two weeks of getting a project out and… well, nevermind, I don’t wanna talk about work. Let’s just say, busy with a side of busy.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about music.

My current big band obssion is The Bad Plus.

I blogged about them not long ago; but since then I’ve seen them play live since.

I discovered this band sort of by accident; my friend Chris (also known as Papa by my kids, Christo von Paisley back in the Jailbait Babysitters days), and as Papa Christo by a whole lot of our friends, mixing the two nicknames together) handed me These are the Vistas one day a couple years ago, saying, you like jazz, you should check these guys out. , and I liked them instantly.

If you have not listened to them, it’s impossible to convey in one or two song samples, and it’s difficult to describe. They are a basic jazz piano trio (piano, stand up bass, drums). However, they have a way of playing with a rock sensibility, even while very much being a jazz group. They are not really fusion, certainly not what I think of as fusion (chick corea, john mclaughlin, herbie hancock, joe zawinul). Sonically, they’re pure jazz. Yet they manage to feel more purely like a fusion than any of those bands did, at least back in fusion’s heyday in the 70s and 80s; no electric instruments, no funk bass, no distortion, but instead the rock coming from driving beats and a rock-infused melodic sense.

They play covers from Bacharach to Rush, Tears for Fears to Queen, Interpol to Black Sabbath. Yet it’s their originals I find most inspired (and you’ll find two examples below); these guys are all three accomplished composers, with distinctly different styles.

A few months ago, when I saw Richard Thompson play in Saratoga, CA, I noticed The Bad Plus listed on a bill of upcoming acts. So I was watching for tickets to go on sale.

When then did, I was nearly first in virtual line, snapping up front row seats in what has to be one of the south bay’s best small venues, the Villa Montalvo carriage house theater.

I wasn’t sure who would be going wth me, but I picked up three tickets; Chris, I was sure, would want one, but Kenny or one of my other jazz musician friends would be interested; a good seat is almost always easy to give away.

Cut to a month ago, when I posted this entry; my nine-year-old daughter Ruby, who’d always responded stringly to jazz (from the time she was an infant, if I had jazz on, she calm down and listen), developed an un-expected love for The Bad Plus.

She impressed the hell out of me. TBP are, to say the least, somewhat challenging; they play weird songs, weird time signatures, bizarre improvisational sections. They’re not user friendly jazz. Ruby got them, and loved them. She kept seeking them out in my iPod, asked me to load them onto hers. When I told her I had an extra ticket, she enthusiastically said yet, I want to go!

When the night of the show came, Ruby was excited to the point of speechlessness. Se’s funny like that, her sister gets twitchy and talks non-stop when excited, chatters so fast you wonder when she has time to breathe. Not Ruby; she goes near-catatonic. Like so much sensory input sends her into a fugue state. That’s how they were when we were seeing Wicked; Olivia vibrating and ruby absolutely still, wide-eyed and stone faced. Both in a state of rapture, but with polar opposite appearances.

Read more “The Bad Plus”