SONG OF BOB

I wrote this while procrastinating bottling honey this past week. The original two-chord progression was for something completely different, but then the "fifths" happened and before I knew it I was making something new.

The feeling and then the lyrics came from a recent conversation in Ashland, Oregon with some farmers: they were complaining about homeless people pooping in the Rogue River which is creating an E. coli situation for the farmers and everyone else. The brutal fire season in California has been on my mind as well…

Here in Seattle it’s fall. Leaves are turning, as much as they turn. Skies bring more shades of gray than you thought possible; rains have begun. Days are shorter than nights; mornings hint at the chill of winter.

The great cultural signal of all this is the Puyallup Fair, now known as the Washington State Fair. Washington’s largest fair, it brings over one million people to the valley beneath Mt. Rainier. The fair wrapped up last weekend, but I bask in its afterglow…

In Seattle, the Belltown neighborhood used to be a warehouse-y, industrial district also inhabited by artists. There, the Penny University coffeehouse occupied a storefront on 2nd Avenue on the front edge of the first wave of gentrification before the Millennium. Sunday was avant garde jazz night; another night was open mic for musicians, and on Tuesday nights open mic for poets. Smoking wasn’t outlawed yet and so the room was a smoke-filled snow globe with sidewalk access; at the appointed hour it got shook up. Everyone gripped their leafy notebooks and—before cell phone culture—actually listened…

In the last post I wrote of improvisation and music, and so here is more on the same. This piece arrived into my notebook while I was on a break while working the International Children’s Festival some years ago… I sat in the balcony of the Seattle Center House with the hubbub below, the echoes of festival theater, music, children’s shrieks, the language of life echoing all around me.

In late 2014, Amy and I introduced Japhy to Kermit the Frog, and in the process showed him a video of Steve Martin and Kermit the Frog playing “Dueling Banjos.” Almost two and a half years old and completely mesmerized, Japhy dubbed it “Frog Banjo Music”…

It’s good to remember, even if difficult. I think of these two boys often, especially now, 20 years after their tragic passing…

Nine years ago, with the encouragement of a few friends, I launched the non-profit that would become the Common Acre. Our original charter was much more humanistic (rather than ecology-focused), with inquiries such as “What is Community?” Our first production was “Bilocal” in which Seattle invited New Orleans over for dinner.

The simple pleasures of youth become the big dreams of middle age. What do I dream? What I have always dreamed. If my body fails, the impulse remains. Is that desire enough, even when our bodies crumble?

The new plan was this: a post every week; I was going to call it The Saturday Evening Post, in fact, with appropriately subversive references to Norman Rockwell. Then 10 months went by—how did that happen?

Here’s how…

Since we've been talking about John Cage, I was reminded of a salon I hosted in a community house—"The Grange"—in which I lived in the early 90s here in Seattle. Specifically, it was November 1991; a number of us had recently moved to a house in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, then still a little ragged and out of the way.