Rankin, our contact at Findiit.com, is watching for revenue to begin. I wrote a reassuring email for him to be patient. If he gets 1% of the market he’ll be rich. Included was a blurb about my business card idea to see if he’ll take a second look. Isn’t this around the fifth year I’ve kicked the concept around for lack of the correct programming skills?Music is a different story. Today I assigned the first real homework to the class. Each has picked a tuned to learn for next week, a total of five tunes. While each assignment is individual, each person must necessarily learn to strum to the other’s choices. This has become one of my most advanced classes yet.
A new person sat in for a look, a drummer. I’m glad because the class was able to see first hand how far they have come in just six weeks. The class could see they had been where he was such a short time ago and he was astonished how we could now pick an unfamiliar tune and all play it together.
That doesn’t extend to music outside the class, which happened to be at the Bakery again (2033 Harrison Street). This is the coffeehouse type place the Hippie is playing and I hadn’t a coffee in close to twelve hours. I walked from the car, thought about it, then went back and got my bass so as not to show empty-handed. He produced a copy of our song list many years back. I remembered maybe six on that list, others I could not ever recall having learned at all. Me play “Stormy Monday”?
We did a respectable job anyway, although somebody was out of tune. There is a saxophone player, but the man has limited experience. My deduction is that the Hippie never told him we’ve got ten years experience and he got to feeling a little eclipsed. He got on stage and kept over-playing through every break, including the lead breaks. You don’t do that to a guitar player. Too late. A few other musicians showed and one large bearded fellow has an excellent screensaver of the performance last week.
During my gig search two years back, I naively tried the door at a building with turrets, then called “The Cove”. Now it has reopened as “The Castle” and the Hippie is seeking a Sunday show. Since the place looks weird even from the outside, I would have thought fine, but just then the Hippie actually stated his job was to drum up business for the club. That is blatant capitalism, and about time, too. I stopped in to look at the place on the way home from Bingo and it is your typical fetish bar. As with all sexual aberration, it was ninety-five percent men. It is styled like a South American girlie bar, with one big dance floor and seats all around the dark perimeter.
Bingo was a wipe-out again, with fewer than ten players. Why do we persist? Easy, we’ve all been to Bingo, or at least I have, and this little game has become one of the best organized. I’m thinking. Via a collection of little items learned in the past month, such as background music and a real PA system, we’ve created a distinctive atmosphere. If this catches on, it will really take off. The Powerball is up to $68, and shall we see how you feel when it hits $500?Unusual item of the day, remember those old push lawnmowers? As the wheels turned, it spun the blades and cut the grass. Take away the handlebars and replace them with, well, bicycle handlebars. And then the rest of the bicycle. A bicycle with the front forks extended and replaced by a mower blade. The poor man’s lawn tractor. I’ve got a photo which I could publish. But a component of this blog is to spur you into following things up on your own. So instead I’ll let you search for it yourself. As it were, your homework assignment.
[Author's note 2015-10-06: the missing toe scene in "Mississippi Grind" six years later is pure coincidence. There is nothing unusual about this type of coincidence in this blog. Generally, however, I do not believe in coincidence.]
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