Week 5: "Three Little Birds"

"If your a bird then I'm a bird." - Allie Hamilton ("The Notebook")

In order to write this blog, I laid Week #5's videos out in front of me, listening and hoping that a narrative would emerge. I saw essays, epics and sagas, but no blogs. 

I realized that I must simply construct a bite-sized, epic saga, with essays interspersed. Therefore, I must write like the great Italo Calvino.

In the middle, long after the separation that would drive his tormented path, but before producing the cinematic wonders showcased below, The Maestro was restless and silent. 

Dissonance comes upon men of great brilliance rapidly, especially under conditions like which pursued him as he limped into the fifth week of his "Dispatches from the Woodshed"

In this unsettled state, contemplating the work to come, he discovered a large, pine crate upon his doorstep, explained by a note, which said:

"Your tools are worn and broken, these will serve you well." 

The note was unsigned, but inside was a Zoom Handy Video Recorder Q3 and a miraculous, translucent iMac.

The writing looked familiar to him, but the memory of it was faded and distant, and fragmented in his steely, vacated mind. Like something too close to see.

The mystery was soon forgotten to him; however, he allowed distraction to wash over him as he began to tinker with the marvels that excited him greatly. Over stimulated, the Maestro began keeping odd hours and entertaining wild thoughts. 

Asleep inside him had been a storm. The sleepless nights had awoken it.

He would curse himself to tears and cry himself to renewed fury.

He would punish his fingers for minuscule errors of technique, tearing the skin around his mauled fingernails with his yellow teeth until they bled so much they slipped from the strings of his instrument, until the fresh tears engulfed his blood shot eyes.

He has become fixated on trying to be Charlie Parker's equal; he's eradicating his own potential for equality with his heroes by obsessing over becoming a greater singer than Billy Holiday.

With distance and time, he would have acknowledged that he had become delusional. 

"No man can sing like Billy Holiday, play like Charlie Parker, or write like Italo Calvino," he would've humbly admitted.

"The mind is full of snares and traps with which man besets himself

and

He is a fool who chases only the horizon."

 The Fool arose dancing. Disheveled and noodling happily, The Maestro began his performance.

Day #30: "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey.

  

 Recorded on the cracked iTouch given to him by Eric Scofield, it was not his finest work.

Day #31: Blindsided," by Bon Iver from the album "for Emma, forever ago" 

On Day #32, he recorded "The Promise" with its writer, Nicole Ste Croix, his estranged wife.

Though married, they had lived apart for some time. Years before, while still living as a husband and wife, she had written this song for their old friends, of whom they'd describe in it: "The best kinds of friend, for they are crazy like us."

It was a song prescribing fortitude to tenuous relationships.

It had read, in the years that followed, like a terrible oracle regarding the fate of their union. The years that came after were the craziest and most brutal that either of them had ever encountered.

In this performance, you can see both weariness and relief pressed upon their faces, left as a watermark to signify all the storms and floods that came before.

Yet, the oil painting of Calvary, propped behind them, signifies even more profoundly the great love of the artist who had painted this gift to them in happier times. It was not the only symbol of selfless love that Eric Scofield had given the ill-fated pair in the years prior.

On Day #32, Love flew from the shattered lens of the iTouch. 

 Love perched, lingering upon that cursed, painted Tree. 

Love nested there for the duration of the performance. 

After, it returned, twittering upon molecular pathways to the place it had come from.  When Eric first saw this link, he "liked" the grainy, feathered image of his own love, and promptly re-Tweeted it.

.

This is too long for a blog and Calvino would hate this over wrought style of writing.

The solo at the end of the previous song has no tone, no warmth, and no ear to the dynamic of the song.

He hides behind a flat guitar, made even more flat by his decision to accentuate its awful, sour notes tacky, ill-timed bends. 

It would have been better the "maestro ' had just been silent.

Day #33 brought "Rain." By Patty Griffin.

Bad Hair Day #34!!!!.......... And here is the whole "Crazy as Me" routine. Performed originally by Alison Krauss and Union Station, it here seems unfit for any stop at any station. 

Poorly delivered and lacking any real substance one might just as well handcuff the "maestro" responsible for it to the railroad track and be thankful when the train arrives for his terrified scream could sound no worse than this.

His silence alone, of all the sounds he makes, would please me.

"It is best when I stop talking sometimes."

Charlie "Bird" Parker was 34 when he succumbed to the effects lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer. His remains were mistakenly classified as "between 50 and 60 years old" by his coroner.
He was a lifelong heroin addict, had cirrhosis, had a heart attack, had built a legacy and had lost a daughter.

The death of Billie Holiday's mother sent her into a downward spiral of alcoholism and leading up to the arrests that landed her in a mental institution. With almost nothing to her name, she died at the age of 44, the victim of ill health caused by her lifelong addiction to heroin.

They both understood why caged birds sing for both had been in prison more than once.

In both narratives, there is passion and pain, a cross and a song.

In most narratives, like most churches, there is a cross hanging off center oft praised by the somber songs of sinners or the circus praises of out- of-key idiots.

The Maestro had stumbled into Week #5 under the weight of a cross. He had hobbled similarly through the previous 3 years and 3 months of his hungry and harrowed existence.

In each narrative, Eric Scofield demonstrated the way in which Love should carry the weak.

 Now, from both narratives, the Maestro demonstrates how love carries itself forth.

From this narrative, on Day #35, we see the Maestro fly.

"Music is simply grace in flight, and in every narrative, healing heralds Love as it ascends.

As the pain in all narratives gives way to hope so gravity gives way to flight."

It is nicer to hear him explain this, for he sings it, ascending lightly through the notes of the
B Major scale.

It is always magical to hear the Maestro sing.

A fairy tale ending, though it's not a thing like how Italo Calvino would've done things.

Told you so!

Though gravely flawed in certain aspects, Day #35 was doubtlessly the maestro's best performance yet.  First day recorded with new toys, so we really should be applauding the Zoom Handy Recorder and the iMac.

Here is "The Fly" written by Nick Drake, and performed masterly by the amazing Maestro.

(Not quite "a fairy tale ending," but what the hell, kiss the frog and see what happens. ;)

Still believing,Ian Ste Croix

PS and if this blog is too long then you are simply a sucker for reading it.

PPS "I acknowledge that this week's blog was dense, self indulgent and inaccessible, but SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel anyway please. Practice makes perfect and this years has as much to practice as it does to perfect."


"She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them." - Flannery O'Connor (The Circle in the Fire)