Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Bridge of Dread


It is . . . ironic? . . . appropriate?. . . that today is Bridge of Dread in the Universal Solar Calendar.  If it weren't a leap year, yesterday would have been Bridge of Dread, and yesterday a container ship struck an abutment in Baltimore, collapsing the Francis Scott Key Bridge and killing at least six, miraculously not more. Images of the fallen bridge and an amazing video of the actual collapse are all over the news and social media.   

Today was also a "bridge," so to speak, from last weekend's Big Ears festival back to "normal" (whatever that is), day-to-day life. The festival officially ended Sunday, but on Monday morning I still woke up in a Knoxville hotel, and much of the day was spent driving back home - not "normal," day-to-day activities. Tuesday would have been "bridge" day, but it rained all day and I stayed indoors, foregoing my usual routines of grocery shopping and walking exercise. Today, I finally put the shorts and sneakers back on and got outside and got my miles and steps in, and restocked my pantry with low-sugar, low-carb foods for my new, pre-diabetic diet.

I've made a lot of friends at Big Ears over the years and part of my attraction to the festival is getting together with the community of "strange" music lovers. One of those friends is a gentleman from the UK who flies to the US every year just for the festival. I've known him for three years now. In the course of our conversations, we realized that back in the late 1970s we were both at the same Art Ensemble of Chicago concert at Jonathan Swift's in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What are the odds of two people, one from Redding, England and the other from Atlanta, Georgia, going to the same concert at Jonathan Swift's, a tiny nightclub tucked away in New England, and then meeting some 45 years later in Knoxville, Tennessee? 

Today, that fine gentleman drop-boxed me 2¼ hours of FLAC files from his tape recording of that AEOC show.  I'm listening to it now and can attest that it's the "real deal." He apparently recorded it straight to cassette from his table (back in the day, one sat at tables with waitress service at clubs), but the quality is remarkable for what it is.  

Oh. Big Ears, you keep on surprising!

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Sixth Ocean


Today is the 86th day of the year 2024. If this weren't a leap year, it would be the 85th day. Why is that significant? Because yesterday would have been the 84th day of the year if not for the extra leap year day and we would have completed seven dozen days so far this year.
  
And so what about that? In the Universal Solar Calendar, the day after each dozenth day is called "First Ocean," "Second Ocean," and so on until for some reason Angus MacLise squeezed in Fourth and Fifth Ocean in the five days after Third Ocean, the day after the 36th day of the year. And then, again for some reason, he resumed naming the days after the dozenth as an Ocean, making today Sixth Ocean.

Logically, today would be Seventh Ocean, as it occurs after the seventh dozen day of the year, but art and not logic seems to guide the naming of days in the Universal Solar Calendar. The extra leap year day just makes it even more confusing. And don't hold your breath for Seventh Ocean - that doesn't occur until the 160th day of the year.

But anyway, I've been including compositions from Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean series on each Ocean day, and it seems in keeping with last weekend's Big Ears festival to continue that today with this amazing performance by Hélène Breschand of Occam XVI on harp.

Monday, March 25, 2024

The Ant Garden

 

I drove home from Knoxville today. Traffic was a lot better than on the way up, and it took me only about 3½ hours to get back.  

Yesterday, my feet and legs were sore from the two previous days of festival walking. Friday, I walked 2.8 miles (7,624 steps) and Saturday, 2.2 miles (6,471 steps). Although both days were short of my exercise goal (10,000 steps per day), the mileage doesn't take into account the hours of standing in line waiting for venue doors to open and standing while listening to performances.  

Despite my sore feet, for the most part I stuck with my originally planned schedule yesterday that included no seated venues. I saw both Ches Smith's Laugh Ash and Void Patrol at the Standard, sneaking in a plate of barbeque in between the sets. After Void Patrol, I walked over to Jackson Terminal thinking I could snag a seat to see the band, Ahleuchatistas, but by the time I got there, the few seats available were already taken and I had to stand through another performance. I did manage to secure a seat at Regas Square to see Danish guitarist Jacob Bro, but after yet another day of standing and walking, finally sitting and listening to some dreamy, quiet music put me into a sort of hypnogogic trance. I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep or something in between. I ended the day (and the festival) with a set by pianist John Medeski, guitarist Marc Ribot, and drummer Joe Russo. Although it was another no-seat venue, the music was energetic and raucous enough to pull me out of my stupor and make me forget about my sore feet.

And that was it for my 2024 Big Ears experience. I'm back home now, still a little sore but rested, and looking forward to resuming the life I left behind.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Godsong to the Pale Blue Women


Sunday morning . .  the last day of  Big Ears. To my dismay, I noted that my schedule for the day called for all standing-only venues, and my legs are still sore from yesterday. Between the walks from venue to venue, standing in lines waiting, and then standing through 60-to 90-minutes sets, I know my feet won't last long. But if I change my schedule to seated venues, I give up the opportunity to see several of the artists that I came to this festival to see in the first place.

What a dilemma.

The Remnants of Bella


I may not be eating healthy, but I'm getting my exercise in. Yesterday, I totaled 10,856  steps over 2.8 miles between the hotel, the Bijou Theater, The Point, the Old City PAC, back to the hotel, and then the long walk to the Civic Auditorium and back again.

This morning, I couldn't decide how to start my day. Did I want to start with the long walk up to the Mill & Mine for a standing-only show by Secret Chiefs 3, or go literally next door to a seated show by Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau? I couldn't decide and figured I'd just hit the street and see which direction my feet would take me. I left my hotel room and called the elevator, and when the doors opened, there was one person already in the elevator, riding down to the lobby - Mr. Christian McBride. If that's not an omen, I don't know what is - maybe not exactly a sign from God, but maybe from an even higher authority.

After McBride and Mehldau, I saw the band Sexmob uptown at The Standard. After that was a great show at the Old City PAC by the poet and spoken word performer Aja Monet, with a surprise band that included pianist Vijay Iyer and drummer Nate Smith. 

I saw portions of several shows after that including the end of performer Ka Baird's set, the beginning of the set by the band Make a Move, and the middle part of Tomas Fujiwara's Seven Poets Trio.  I finally settled down, though, and saw the entirely of the set by Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. I saw the first half of the late-night (11:30 pm) set at The Standard by the Messthetics featuring saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, but my feet were killing me. I couldn't stand around watching a band, no matter how good, much longer.  I called it a night and took the long walk back to my hotel.

One more day of Big Ears left. 

Friday, March 22, 2024

Day of Sargasso


Day Two of Big Ears. So far today, I've seen Trevor Dunn' Trio-Convulsant avec Folie a Quatre, as well as Brandon Ross Phantom Station at the Bijou. After a long walk uptown I saw the legendary Fred Frith and the soon-to-be-legendary-if-not-already-so Ikue Mori at the Point. I scarfed down a chili dog, and then saw Anna Webber and Matt Michell (sax, flute, and piano duo).  Can't stay long because I'm off to see another legend - Laurie Anderson.   

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Day of Kalimantan


Can't write much tonight - it's late and I drove up to Knoxville, Tennessee today from Atlanta for the 2024 Big Ears Festival. I saw the Tord Gustavsen Trio tonight, as well as Nik Bartsch's Ronin. My final set was The Angelic Brothers, a new duo of John Medeski and Kirk Knuffke interpreting the music of Sun Ra.

We'll catch up later.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Plaint of the Host


It's really cliché at this point.  People who've had heart attacks or cancer diagnoses say that despite the tragic events, "it was the best thing to happen to me." The reminder of our mortality helps us appreciate life while we still have it, encourages us to take better care of our health and our bodies, and reminds us of how precious our loved ones are.

I'm going to be honest with you - getting an email message saying I'm prediabetic was neither the greatest nor the worst day of my life.  Overall, it was just another day. But the diagnosis has made me aware of my diet in ways I wasn't before, and rather than merely recognizing "I probably shouldn't be eating so much of this," I have a fresh, new encouragement to eat something else. And exercise is now more than just an obligation or something to do when I run out of other distractions. And eating better and exercising more is already making me feel better overall, physically and mentally. 

This coming weekend is going to be a challenge. It's Big Ears festival this weekend and while I'll probably get my miles and steps in, eating is catch-and-catch-can. My hope is that the past few days I've started on some healthier habits and once I return, I'll naturally revert to more wholesome ways. After all, I've been eating pizza and barbecue for some seven decades now without dying, I should be able to go one more weekend without keeling over.

I walked 3.8 miles today, but so far have only logged 9,839 steps, short of the 10,000-step goal.  I'm hoping to make up the difference later today shuffling back and forth from the computer to the kitchen, and from the sofa to the bathroom.

But it's not all about me. I sent the Moms some flowers today at the rehab center and hope the cheer and good wishes they represent make her a little bit less ornery with her nursing staff.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Day of Niagara


I have seen Niagara Falls in the winter, not completely frozen but with ice on the surrounding rocks and in the splash pool, and the walkway and observation deck coated with snow, ice and hoarfrost. It was a weekday afternoon in December with temperatures down in the teens, and no other tourists were around - we had the unique view all to ourselves.

I've actually seen the Falls many times and in other seasons, but what with today being the Vernal Equinox and the sixth day of Spring season in the Universal Solar Calendar and all, I choose to imagine the Falls in a seasonally appropriate manner.

Buffalo and the City of Niagara Falls are in an industrial belt developed along the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario. As an environmental consultant, I had clients in that corridor and trips to the Buffalo/Niagara area were common. If time allowed (and it almost always did), we drove over to the overlook to see the Falls.

The sad truth is there are a lot of industrial wastewater discharges along the Niagara River, as well as  upstream into Lake Erie at Cleveland, Sandusky, and Toledo. But the good news is that at least the volatile organic part of that pollution, the benzene and toluene and chloroethenes and -ethanes, are stripped from solution in water by aeration, and Niagara Falls is, in one sense, one very large water aerator, effectively stripping all those volatile organics from the river water. "God's own air stripper," we jokingly called it. 

I don't have the data to prove it, but I'm convinced water in upstream Lake Ontario (below the Falls) is much cleaner that the water in downstream Lake Erie (above the Falls), at least with regard to volatile organic chemicals.  Your heavy metals, PCBs, PFAS, pesticides, and so on are another matter.

So far, a day-and-a-half in, I'm sticking with my prediabetes diet. Same breakfast and lunch as yesterday. Dinner tonight will probably be an herb-rusted chicken breast with some diced sweet potatoes. Fruits for dessert and for snacks if I want.

The Moms has been transferred from the hospital to rehab to learn to walk with her new, replacement hip. No word yet if this will take days, weeks, months, or more.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Day of the Gamelan


So am I really doing this? This morning, I had an English muffin - no butter or topping - for breakfast. Am I really going to be the kind of person who has an English muffin for breakfast? 

Recent bloodwork indicates that I'm prediabetic, and while I can't change my lifestyle overnight, I can begin here and now the gradual change to a healthier diet and more exercise.

So am I really the kind of person who has an English muffin for breakfast? Apparently, not yet. Yes, I did have a muffin this morning - a low-fat, "light" muffin with <1 gram total sugar, lightly toasted. I had to pull the toaster out from deep storage in the back of a cupboard and to give you an idea of how long it had been there, there was a refrigerator magnet attached to it bearing a calendar for 2007. But in addition to the muffin, I had two large cups of coffee - black, no sugar - a banana and an orange.  And some plain yogurt mixed with strawberries and blueberries and topped with a sprinkling of granola.

My revelation for the morning came with my breakfast beverage. For almost a year now, before even morning coffee, I've been drinking a small bottle of water to start the day.  For a while, it was Vitamin Water, but that stuff's expensive and besides, my supermarket's been phasing it out of stock. I switched to Gatorade, which is a lot cheaper and more plentiful on the supermarket shelves, but this morning I saw on the label that a 20-ounce bottle of Gatorade contain 34 grams of sugar, 69% of the recommended daily allowance.

I knew Gatorade contained salt and heard warnings about its sodium levels, but I had no idea there was that much sugar.  So much for that as my morning beverage.

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," we've all been told, and I think I gave my breakfast due consideration. It was reasonably filling and kept me going through a 2:00 pm tax prep appointment, and I still had enough energy to go afterwards and get my car washed.  When I got back home, I did my walking exercise, totaling four miles and 3,265 steps for the day. 

After I got back home from my walk, I finally ate an admittedly late lunch - a Caesar salad topped with chicken. I got in a little more exercise taking out the trash and rolling the dumpster down the steep hill of my driveway.

Somewhere along the line I ate another orange and toasted another English muffin.

Dinner tonight will probably be a 6-oz beefsteak (left over from before I discovered my elevated glucose), with a dollop of mashed potatoes and a bunch of green beans. If I need to snack, there's more oranges and handfuls of roasted peanuts in the pantry.

One day of this new diet and exercise, and it's got me blogging about it like I've accomplished something. I promise I won't be uploading my daily menu every day, but it's a start and I do feel like, yes, I have accomplished something, at least by my standards.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Krakatoa Day


After much due consideration, I've determined that I'm temperamentally incapable of instantly transitioning to the dietary and exercise recommended for a prediabetes lifestyle, at least as prescribed by the Johns Hopkins and CDC websites. 

I'm not a cook and I take little pleasure in spending time in the kitchen chopping vegetables, simmering sauces, or whatever else you're supposed to do to prepare "baked pesto tilapia and roasted vegetable quinoa" for dinner.  I can't reasonably see myself eating tofu vegetable stir-fry for lunch or whole-grain avocado toast for breakfast. I haven't prepared elaborate meals for myself in like 30 years and don't see myself turning into some Whole Foods Betty Crocker overnight.

And as for exercise, it's recommended that one gets at least 150 minutes of vigorous exercise a week (which is a really odd metric because that amounts to 21.4 minutes per day, and who monitors their workout time to tenths of a minute?), or 10,000 steps a day.  Look, I'm 70 years old, and if I can get my socks on in the morning, that's vigorous exercise to me. But I get it - less time in front of the computer playing video games, more time out on the street doing something, anything.

So I'll opt for the 10,000 steps per day instead. As it is, I try to walk about 2.5 miles every other day, and can easily step that up to every day now that spring is here. But 2.5 miles is only about 6,600 steps, at least according to my phone, and I need a lot more than that to meet the 10,000-step quota. Yesterday, I managed to get in 10,288 steps by pushing my walk to 3.5 miles, but I was exhausted and needed a nap afterwards. I had things I needed to do today and the weather was less than optimal so I didn't get the walk in today, and I have an appointment mid-day tomorrow, but still the 3.5-mile daily walk is a reasonable aspirational goal.

As for the food, like I said, I'm not an avocado toast kind of guy. And next week is Big Ears where eating is a challenge, and "healthy, heartwise" eating is a near impossibility. It's carbo-loading at the hotel breakfast buffet in the morning, and then grabbing whatever you can on the fly during the day - a slice or two of pizza, some barbecue, a burrito, whatever. Getting in the 10,000 steps isn't a problem - a lot of the time is spent walking up and down Gay Street from one venue to another - but healthy eating? Forgetaboutit.

I'm going to have to work my way toward better eating, but the change isn't going to happen overnight. I went food shopping today and deliberately didn't buy a lot of the pasta and prepared foods I'd been subsisting on.  I still bought cereal, but I selected only those that had the lowest sugar contents (never liked the super-sweet, kiddie stuff anyway). The websites forbid whole milk but fuck you, I'm not eating my cereal with skim or some 2% dairy product, so deal with it. I bought a ton of fruit, some vegetables, salads, lentils, nuts, and berries. Brown rice and whole-wheat bread. It's a start.

After I get back from Big Ears, I can try going deeper into the recommended diet. It's going to be a series of baby steps, not a whole-hearted leap into the rice-cake menu, but it's a start and it's better than what I've been doing, and if that's not good enough for my glucose and my A1C, then fuck them.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Day of the Doldrums


Trees fall, and their falling causes me much anxiety ever since one fell on my house 3½ years ago.  Many have fallen around here since, knocking out power for four hours, eight hours, and longer.

Old people fall, too, and last Wednesday night, my 91-year-old mother fell and broke her right hip. She was in terrible pain and unable to walk but fortunately she lives with my sister who called an ambulance and took her to the hospital.

Friday morning, she underwent emergency hip-replacement surgery. The surgery went well and after rehab she should be able to walk again, but it's unclear how long rehab will take or if she'll ever be able to return home.

According to my sister's reports, the Moms is being an uncooperative patient, refusing to let nurses touch her or to take her medications. She's being watched 24/7 as she's been trying to take out her IV and remove her ID bracelet.  There's nothing about this story that bodes well for the Moms.

Each year, millions of older people, those 65 and older, fall. According to the CDC, more than one out of four older people falls each year, although less than half tell their doctor. But falling once doubles your chances of falling again. Medications can increase a person's risk of falling because they cause side effects such as dizziness or confusion. Generally speaking, the more medications you take, the more likely you are to fall.

Gravity's a bitch and will eventually get us all in the end, be we trees, mothers, or ROMs.  It's as if the Earth itself decides at some point that we've spent enough time on her surface, and then pulls us down deep into her bosom to reclaim our biomass. Recycle our carbon as it were.   

"You're time is up," gravity whispers to us. "Come on down."

Impermanence is swift.