George Carlin

And then right after finishing the last entry, I went to my homepage and saw that George Carlin just died. Crap.

Carlin was the first comedian I ever loved. Back in the Laugh-In days, he did a routine called The Hippie Dippy Weatherman, featuring such gems as

...and the forecast for tonight is dark, with scattered light toward morning...

He had an absurdist's sensibility, but he was just as sharp about politics and culture, as we all know. (His routine about the differences between football and baseball is simply spectacular--brilliantly written and funny as hell.) And as a wordsmith, he used language better than any comedian since Twain. (No surprise that just Tuesday it was announced that Carlin would be given this year's Twain Award.)

Heart attack, just this afternoon, just down the road in Santa Monica. I say again: crap.

MyLastGoodTwitterFaceFlickrReadsBook

As a person of a certain age, the whole "social networking" thing, i.e. using the isolation of a computer to connect with other equally isolated people, seemed just a bit off. Over the years, though, various attempts have been made, some more successful than others, and I've slowly found myself drawn into these little devils. In no particular order, here are some of the places where I can be found:

MySpace - Probably the paradigm of the social networking space, and I can be found here in a few places--both as myself, and as someone named "Incorporation for Artists," plus of course "Zen Noir" can be found here as well. Not to mention Sergei from "Outta Sync," a character I played in a movie. (Distressingly, Sergei has more friends than I do!) The thing that bugs me about MySpace, though, is how busy it is. Sure it's nice that you can skin the appearance of your profile page, but those skins can get so involved--not to mention all the YouTube videos and music tracks that autoload and all the rest of it--that the page takes forever to load. My own sister's page has so much stuff on it that it (a) loads verrrry slowly, and (b) scrolls even morrrrre slowly, so that I almost never go there anymore because it's just too annoying.

Facebook - I resisted Facebook for ages because I'd already been on MySpace for about two years and couldn't for the life of me see any reason to be on two sites that accomplish nearly identical things. But a couple months ago I relented, and was rewarded with a fantastic immediate dividend: a great friend of mine from high school, Shannon Chamberlain (nee Walker), happened to search for my name just a few days after I signed onto Facebook. We reconnected after way too long, and as it happened I was about to go for a visit to Miami, so we were able to get together almost immediately. And, of course, it was one of those things where the years fell away and we almost instantly dropped into the same old delightful groove. This immediately made me into a huge Facebook fan. Since then I've found a bunch of people from college as well, and it just seems to work better for finding and connecting with people. Plus, the profile pages aren't skinnable, so the pages load much faster (my sister's page pops right up). On the other hand, those thousands of mini-apps can get seriously overwhelming--I'm constantly being sent "flairs" (little virtual buttons with pithy little aphorisms), or internet hugs or karma, or being invited to become someone's virtual feudal vassal, or being invited to take a quiz to find out which Shakespeare play I am. I drew the line at a vampire game where a friend of mine virtually bit me. Sorry, vamps are right out. Me no likee vampires. They scary.

Twitter - Okay, this one I just don't get. It's like microblogging, where there's a fixed limit to how many characters you can type at any given time. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads any of my blog entries--I am just not that sort of writer. I like to luxuriate in language, to set the words rolling and see where they go. (Marc Rosenbush, on the other hand, is a minimalist--this is why he and I are good collaborators when we write together, because our approaches to writing are perfectly complementary--and he gets the Twitter paradigm immediately.) But more importantly, almost no one I know Twitters at all, so there's next to nothing to draw me there on any sort of consistent basis. I've written a grand total of three entries since joining, always without any enthusiasm. The sort of self-involved navel-gazing that Twitter seems to promote just doesn't fit my personality--the only person on earth I can think of who might care to know what I've been doing twenty times a day is my mom. But she isn't on Twitter either, so why?

Flickr - Then there are the sites that focus on social networking built around one particular activity. Flickr, for instance, is about photographs. From time to time I take pictures off the computer and put them on Flickr. Sometimes I put them there in order to post them here, but it's also nice to invite family members so that they can check out pictures as well. Nothing spectacular, but I understand what it does and why, and it's simple to use.

Goodreads - This one is all about books, so naturally it's a little closer to my heart. The site is labor-intensive--you have to enter each book you own one by one, and in my case that's a boatload of books. I've only entered a little over a hundred, which make up just three shelves of one bookcase--and I've got eight bookcases. (Not to mention the books that are literally piled across the top shelves of my kitchen cabinets.) But the idea is that you enter your books, record when you read them and maybe write little reviews, your friends do the same, and that way you can all share stuff you liked or disliked. (For example, when my friend Melissa Klein was about to read Thomas Cahill's "Gifts of the Jews," I was able to tell her why that had been my least favorite of the Cahill books, then once she too had read it she told me why she agreed with my assessment.) For a book lover, the appeal is obvious--for someone who isn't, this one may seem like a waste of time. Fair enough.

Last.fm - Like Goodreads, except for music. The great thing is that this site isn't labor-intensive at all: I downloaded a little application that simply watches the songs I play and records them on the site. So I get stats about which artists I play most often, plus there's a handy internet radio station component--if I'm traveling and don't have my iPod, I can log onto Last.fm and play a station that already knows the kinds of music I like. (It's actually quite good about picking songs I legitimately enjoy.) Very cool.

Okay, that's it, I'm tired now and am going to go do something else. Like sleep, maybe. For which there are no social networking sites at all, and let's all be grateful for that.

Crosby Stills & Ecklie

I've been focusing on the fundamentals of the bass guitar. Bought a book of music theory specifically for the bass, and I'm trying to learn intervals and scales and whatnot. You know, the dull, boring part.

But one bit of advice that I found somewhere recommends that no matter how bad you are when you first pick up an instrument, one of the best things you can do is to start playing with other people. Those other people are almost certainly going to be better than you are, and your natural inclination not to look like an idiot means that you'll learn a lot faster than you would on your own.

My friend and compatriot Marc Rosenbush is of course the person who sorta kinda led to this whole guitar-playing thing in the first place, and as a director, he ain't never been afraid of criticizing someone's work. (As someone whose work is known for its rhythmic sense, he is particularly stringent about trying to get my own rhythms up to snuff.) I play with him fairly regularly, on specific material. But Marc also plays regularly with Marc Vann, and when those two got together the other night, after a couple hours I hauled my bass over and joined them.

(And of course Marc Vann has been in lots of movies and TV shows, but is best known for playing the hard-ass boss Conrad Ecklie on CSI--hence the working name of our band. Although I've also suggested, and am rather fond of, Government Work. As in "Close enough for...")

Marc and Marc had been rocking out on Jethro Tull stuff before I arrived, and were both reciting John Lennon's shout "I've got blisters on me fingers!" But I was able to join in on two Pink Floyd numbers, "Comfortably Numb" and (of all things) "Echoes," complete with spacey whalesong improvisations. And to close out the night, the real CSNY's "Find the Cost of Freedom," as we worried less about instrumentation and worked very hard on vocal harmonies.

And if you're enjoying the thought of Conrad Ecklie pickin' and singin', then you had almost as much fun as I did.

Metronome

I should've bought a metronome the same day I bought my first guitar.

Time is, of course, one of those annoying absolutes. In the music world, the tempo of a song is inescapable and always present. And when I first got the acoustic guitar, I pretty much ignored the whole question of tempo--I just wanted to learn where the notes were, how to make chords, etc. I'd worry about tempo later.

This despite the fact that I knew, from my singing days, that I do not have a natural sense of rhythm. My internal clock works great at getting me up at the right time in the morning, but it does not instinctively know how to count one-two-three one-two-three. Not accurately, anyway.

The good news: it's definitely learnable. There was an HBO program a few weeks ago where Dave Stewart interviewed Ringo Starr, and Ringo mentioned that when he first started drumming he really couldn't keep time at all. Say what you will about Ringo's drumming--he was always known as a rock-solid timekeeper. So this stuff can be learned. I just need to, you know, actually learn it.

As mentioned before, when I bought the bass I also bought a metronome. A couple weeks ago I finally reopened one of the learn-guitar books I bought months ago, before the bass, and decided to start again from page one--this time with the metronome. Turns out, it made a huge difference. When the ticker keeps ticking, you don't have the luxury of waiting till your fingers find the right note to play--you just have to soldier forward, and if it's wrong you either press on then try again later, or you stop and go back to the beginning.

Because a song is what it is, and the notes must be right, and the time signature must be observed. That's all there is to it. I would've been far better off if I'd observed this reality from the beginning.

And by the way, I'm picking things up on the bass far faster than on the guitar. I've already got one song pretty well down ("Comfortably Numb") and am learning another ("Come Together")--whereas on the guitar, I still don't have any songs all the way down, still struggling to put together "Here Comes the Sun." And as friend Buffie (the real musician of our little group) put it a couple weeks ago, after Marc and I successfully played "Comfortably Numb" start to finish, "Looks like you've found your first instrument." Yay. But still more, more, more to learn.

I'll tell you this, though--there was some sturm und drang this weekend, of the serious sort--and I suddenly discovered that having guitars around helped enormously. It was wonderful to just pick up the acoustic and noodle for a while, to take my mind off things. In this way, one falls in love with the instrument that little bit more.

Just one last question. Would a metrosexual gnome be called a metrognome? I'm just askin'.

(And anyone who thinks I wrote this whole entry just so I could tell that one joke, gold star for you!)