This one’s a gem.

Found online, while doing research.

“Continuous productivity improvements allow us to differentiate on the basis of superior quality at market competitive prices without sacrificing our ability to achieve our profit goals.”

I read that three, maybe four times. Here’s my translation:

“Because we make our stuff better all the time, we stand out because our better stuff is better and cheaper than other folk’s stuff – and we make money off it.”

Let me ask you a question. How many times a day do you allow yourself to differentiate – I mean you, personally?

As in, “I allowed myself to differentiate while brushing my teeth this morning.”

Or, “Sorry, I can’t answer my phone right now. I’m differentiating. But your call is important to me, and my altered or modified self will get back to you as soon as I can.”

The bone I’m picking here is that I never considered differentiation to be reflexive.

Silly me.

Yardstick

It was fifty years ago today that John F. Kennedy won the presidential election in 1960.

NPR played a sound clip of JFK speaking at the Garden on election eve. It took my breath away – the man was hot. Every word, uttered with pure conviction, intelligent thought behind each syllable: “All the criticisms that are leveled at presidential campaigns in my judgment fade away against the knowledge which a potential President may have of the strength of this society of ours and our people.”

I’m not a JFK groupie, by any means. I don’t have any of his speeches memorized, I don’t hold him up as a yardstick to any other president living or dead. Mr. Kennedy was human, as we all are. He was not perfect, he is not the model by which all presidents should be judged.

He was a father figure to me, especially after my dad vacated the premises. I was three years old when he was elected, and six when he was shot and killed. My dad died in New York City barely two weeks after JFK’s life was taken.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my childhood in Ohio. It was filled with spacemen and the Beatles and secret agents and baseball heroes and scary movies on Saturday. Fall weather seems to activate these memories. Back in those days, folks would rake their leaves into a pile in their back yards and burn them. The smell of smoldering leaves transports me to the Ohio of fifty years ago instantly.

I reckon that JFK is a a grainy, black-and-white film in the imaginations of my children. I wonder if they can picture little blond-haired five-year-old me watching him speak on television.

What yardstick has my generation left for its young?

Stating the obvious

I spent the day doing nothing.

(Oh, I’m sorry – maybe that should have been a tweet?)

I’m feeling these days that blogs are as dead as Flash, but recently I saw a tweet heralding the decline of Twitter. All things must pass, I guess.

But in the throes of my nothing-doing today, I spent a good amount of time practicing finger-pickin’. See, I never learned finger-style when I was growing up and spending all my free time jamming out to my Clapton, Hendrix, Who and Zappa records. (Yes, records.) I didn’t invest any time in learning how to finger pick like James Taylor or Paul Simon or Leo Kottke or John Fahey or Jorma Kaukonen or… well the list goes on and on.

Note to the young: don’t put off learning how to finger pick, just because you think it’s hard. Or lame. Or “not your style”. You’ll thank me later. Um, unless you don’t actually play guitar at all, in which case you won’t. Thank me later, I mean.

Part of my problem I guess was not having a mentor or coach or someone to point me in the right direction. In the spirit of “it’s never too late”, I have undertaken to get at least some rudimentary chops together. It has been hard work, and my fossilized brain seems to work against me all the time. But here’s a link to my virtual coach Mark Hanson, who stops through perennially to give a concert at TPCUU. He has totally got The Stuff, and he’s written several books and produced several DVDs that will help you get on your way, too.

Because I think it might make a difference somehow, I wrote down a 6/8 pattern I was working on today – just so Mr. Grey Matter wouldn’t forget. (But – will I remember to look HERE for it when I need this information next?)

6/8 fingerstyle pattern

I confess – I have always had a problem with paper management. I still do. My apartment has little hoard stashes of piles of paper that need to be gone through and tossed into the recycle – or shredded before being tossed into the recycle. Well, maybe I’ll shred a handful or two tomorrow – between guitar breaks – before I go back to work on Monday.

Feels good to have a day off.

Say goodbye to Michael for me

When I was growing up, I often heard the maxim that “nobody can forget where they were when they learned that JFK had been shot.”

I was on Twitter when I learned that Michael Jackson had passed. Not quite sure, but I think I was at work in Cambridge. When you’re in Twitterspace, do your surroundings matter?

I turned to my pal Cutler and told him that news was breaking that MJ had suffered a heart attack.

“That guy’s living on borrowed time,” he offered.

“That guy’s living on borrowed cash,” I countered.

My dear friend NPR was filled with soundbites about today’s memorial service. I heard the Reverend Al Sharpton’s heavy, rhythmic tones, his howl that we should focus on the artist, the love. I heard a woman saying that she’s sending her kids to the memorial service because “this is what music is about”.

Well, if you had a pulse in the last 30 years (and knew it), your life was touched by MJ one way or another.

Personally, my life was touched by Quincy Jones more than by MJ – but I’m the type of guy that listens to the bass lines and horn parts BEFORE ever listening to the lyrics. There are dozens of pop songs from the sixties and seventies that I can sing all the orchestrations of, but i barely know any words other than the lyrics in the hook.

Same with MJ. Take, “Rock With You”, which, counter to one pundit’s opinion I heard during the last week’s media hysteria, is most definitely “baby making music”. It opens with a classy, lonely Moogy-sounding synthesizer and builds to a real-live-string-section disco gesture all in the first eight bars. In the hook, there’s a flugelhorn – flugelhorn, mind you – counter line that puts the right touch of mascara on the eyebrows on the song. I could listen to that track over and over – if it weren’t for MJ’s singing.

Yes, I will commit the ultimate heresy and tell you that, to my taste, Michael’s adult singing style is highly irritating.

I heard some breathy ballad he did on the radio the other day, one that I did not recognize. It reminded me of all those cuts that Sinatra shouldn’t have made. I couldn’t really listen to it. His intonation, his attack, his lack of support – it just made me uncomfortable. And that says nothing about the treacly sentiment he was trying to get across. I agree with The Critic I Can’t Remember on one point: Michael had a hard time with the plain old straight-ahead “I Love You” song. It always seemed to come out more like an alien setting foot on our planet for the first time and falling head over heels for a Tussaud wax figure of Marilyn Monroe – kind of stilted and surreal and filled with inner torment and impossibility.

I heard a lot of African-American voices this morning on the radio calling, “He’s black! He’s ours!” Agreed – well, he sure started out black. He was a role model for young African-American artists. He was hot. He was successful. I remember the pictures of him before adolescence descended on him, with his ‘fro poking out from under one of those badass floppy hats. Flaired knit pants and vests – he was totally IT and I sure couldn’t dress the way he did and go around Cleveland expecting to avoid a hassle.

I’ll tell you one thing – I didn’t hear a lot of men calling out, “He’s male! He’s ours!” this morning on the radio.

Let’s face it: Michael wanted to obliterate the assignments of race and gender that he felt made him a prisoner in his own voluptuous castle. He went to great lengths and great expense to alter his appearance to become what? A white woman?

That doesn’t really describe it. Maybe the negative space approach helps here: he was aiming for not black. Not white. Not male. Not female. Not old.

Many complained while he was still alive that the result of his body mod experiments was something not human. So, yeah. The dude looked like a freak show. He was visually hard to take, especially as the surgeries progressed and got worse. In the interviews I heard with him (and I did not see the whole TV special stuff that he put on during the trial, I just heard sound bites) his speaking voice was soft and effeminate. It was as chiseled as his chin, and the point was to communicate, “I am a gentle soul.”

So now, in death, I am hearing many calls to ignore what he did, and to focus on what he produced. What he stood for in his art.

OK, I can do that for a little while. It don’t matter if you’re black or white. I’m down with that. What about the paternity suit inspired “Billie Jean” – the kid is not my son? (It don’t matter if you’re Mom or Dad, he snarked.) But then, there’s “Man In The Mirror” – which is a righteous piece of funk if ever there was one. Read the lyrics: it’s about trying to change the world for good, starting with changing yourself and your outlook. I can get behind that song.

But tell me – “Smooth Criminal” is about a woman getting murdered, right? “Beat It” is about running rather than fighting a gang – do I have that one right too?

I know. You’re saying, “Come on. What? What are the Sex Pistols lyrics about? Or The Clash? James Brown? U2? Rick James? Duran Duran? Don’t come the innocent prude here. People listen to stuff just to feel good.”

Well, you’re right.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that we’re putting Michael in the ground without really looking at him as we’re saying goodbye. Or not saying goodbye, as some have it.

We’re turning a blind eye to the troubled person he was. We’re ignoring that his identity probably tortured him greatly, and that no amount of plastic surgery or lipstick or pretending he was still 11 years old helped him feel better about himself for long. We’re ignoring his legacy of financial mismanagement and his narrow scrape with pederasty laws.

We’re ignoring to a large degree any inroads he might have made in disrupting the boundaries of race and gender. Instead, we’re basking in his huge ego trip, and making it our own huge ego trip.

Just look over your shoulder, honey.

Happy Father’s Day, Mr. Zappa

Dear Frank,

I’m hitting another milestone year. On my next birthday, I will have officially lived longer than you did.

My first one of these milestone years was when I turned 38, and I realized that I had lived as long as my dad had until he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Manhattan. I remember standing on my back porch, trying to imagine *poof*! it’s over at that age. My kids were 12 and 7 at that point, so much gone by and yet so much left to do. I couldn’t really fathom it. Can one ever?

You see Frank, you’re one of my adoptive fathers – which is to say I adopted you growing up. Stuff you said in your work and in your life resonate deeply with me. Your voice remains very familiar to me. I guess I have a few other adoptive dads floating around – John Lennon comes to mind – but I actually have dreams where you appear to me and offer me guidance and direction. Yeah, sometimes you criticize my playing too. But when you appear, you’re definitely in the role of Dad. Mentor. Father.

So today, the Day After Father’s Day, I’m mulling it over once again. What if all of a sudden *poof*! Of course, in your case, you knew it was coming because you were sick for a pretty long time and in a lot of pain. I’m sorry you had to go through that, Frank. I’m sorry you went when you did, the way you did.

I know you really loved your kids. A lot’s been written about your work habits, and how your children referred to you as that grumpy man who comes up from the basement from time to time, but look at them. They love you so much, still.

My Father’s Day present was a drunken call from my younger daughter, wanting to get picked up in the wee hours, far from home, because she had missed her train back to Boston. I declined and suggested she call her mom. We haven’t spoken since. If I could have one real Father’s Day present, it’s that she would wake up and figure out that she needs to help herself – nobody else will do it for her. She needs to stop blaming the world and take the steps she needs to take to keep herself safe and sober.

Underneath the rage and selfishness, I know she loves me. It’s just not in her this year to show it to me on Father’s Day.

Oh well. There’s always next year.

Pencil

Dear Dad,

I keep meaning to write to you. Sorry it’s been so long.

Anyway, whatever, as they say. I woke up yesterday thinking about a question I meant to ask you when I was in kindergarten or first grade.

The question, as I remember it, is this:

When you’re looking at a blank piece of paper, and you’re holding a pencil in your hand, do you know which lines are going to come out of the pencil before they get to the paper? Or does the pencil have control, and you take what it gives you?

I remember imagining the pencil as being a fountain of infinite squiggly lines that I had little to no control over. The pencil was – and remains – something to wrestle with.

For example, if I wanted to draw a cat, I could make lines that would look the way a kid would draw a cat. Circle for a head, triangles for the ears, whiskers. Ovals with vertical slits for eyes.

I remember this though: if I set out to draw a cat – even accepting the fact that it would look like 6-year-old artist outline of cat – I would still be surprised by the results that the pencil would spew out on the page. Maybe the head would be too big, or the ears too small, or the eyes oddly placed.

Well, as they say, this is why you practice. You learn to coordinate the eye, the brain, the hand – and the extension of the hand, the pencil.

Let me jump for a minute to my work with the guitar. I think I’ve done a fairly good job of creating the same kind of flow, from ear to brain to finger to string. I like to say that it’s always a matter of shortening the distance between ear and string, and you have all this stuff in the way – brain, arm, elbow, finger. It’s a matter of making that intermediate stuff lightweight, seamless, transparent, invisible.

When I play a note, I react to it immediately. My reaction informs the way I play the next note. And so on, faster and faster, ad infinitum, until the end of time – which comes up fast in a piece of music.

I guess the goal is to make it all ear, with nothing in between.

Or for you, the goal would have been to make it all eye, with nothing in between. Pencil, brush, knife, piece of lumber, whatever. Tools. Not there.

But the point is – I wanted to ask YOU about how YOU wrestle with the pencil. I think I tried to ask you at one point, but I’m not sure you heard me right or understood me. After all, it’s a pretty complex question for a grown-up to confront. It might not have occurred to you what I was trying to ask when I was four or five.

After you were gone, I remember being in first grade, and the itinerant art teacher would come in once a week, and she’d hand out the blank paper and the crayons, and she’d put something on a table at the front of the room and say, “Draw this.” Pandemonium would usually reign for 45 minutes, the papers would get collected or simply sent home. The girls’ drawing were always very tidy, and the boys’ looked like nightmare recollections. I remember my reaction at the time to these “lessons” was that I was already indoctrinated to this world of art, that I had inside knowledge. But I was always horrified to witness what came out of my pencil, despite my greatest efforts at control.

Hey, I took a life drawing course last summer, Dad. I’m not Leonardo, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think I’d like to do it again. Just me and the charcoal and the model. It feels like facing a familiar opponent each time I look at that big empty piece of paper.

OK well, I’ll write you again soon. I love ya, Dad.

Your son,

Jim