2011, a fond and solipsistic look back

By Robbie on December 30, 2011

No one, or next to no one, need know what's afoot in my life or mind, but at the end of a year, the mental exercise of gathering some of the more stimulating things that happened to me, culling the choicest memories, and pounding them into paragraphs provides me with a little harmless bloggy pleasure. Decay, agitation, disappointment, and intimations of ultimate meaninglessness form a kind of background hum to our lives. To give occasional attention to the flashes of joy with which they're studded isn't a Pollyanna dodge.

1.  Music, played on musical instruments. My youngest son got a big crush on Fats Waller in April and started dedicating several hours a week to the disappearing (as I found when I started looking around Chicago for a specialist) art of stride piano. My middle son, meanwhile, announced his intention to join a nearby "School of Rock," as an emotive and heavy-stick-needing-for-the-warding-off-of-ladies rock vocalist. No dice, I told him; you've got to play a musical instrument, not just sing. In all of my decidedly checkered history of parenting, these words were the most instantly momentous to have leapt from my lips. Now Preston's a very capable drummer, and our house sounds like John Densmore is chained in the basement. So our two young ones have picked up the bug. Now if I can just make a dent in their hatred of reading books, I will bow deeply and turn in my fatherly lunch pail.

2.  Traveling to Kyoto, and getting treated like a risen Huey Long in Baton Rouge.

3.  The best novel I read this year was Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's one of the hundreds of books I've put off reading for too long, but I'm glad I didn't get to it too young. The portrayals of the young woman Maria and older Pilar as, respectively, docile provider and shrewd enabler of warrior-love didn't strongly remind me of any known animal behavior in this particular galaxy, but apart from that, the book crackled with hard-won wisdom, stop-in-your-tracks sentences, and a handful of unforgettable scenes. In non-fiction, I'd recommend David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear to almost anyone. The period it covers, 1929 to 1945, encircles (along with unfair allotments of civilian hardship and feats of political and military brilliance) the death of one America and birth of another, ours. Unless you have extreme and immovable opinions on them, this book will change what you think of Hoover (up a notch), Churchill (down a notch), and Roosevelt (up three). Finally, in short stories, Wells Tower's collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned made a mark.

4.  I had a weeklong club tour at the top of the year, from South Carolina up to NYC, that was a real surprise, to someone who has largely lost his taste for driving around playing clubs. The work wasn't lacking in the typical nonsense of nettlesome and/or technically overstretched sound engineers, tough weather, and time-wasting radio non-promotion. But the simple facts that the routing worked out so well -- 3 to 5 hours between every town -- the shows had full houses, and the sound was actually terrible at only one of the dates made the trip stand out as the best outing I've undertaken in a few years. From picking up a banjo at age 7 to this point in the journey, 41 years later, it seems I have managed through application and wild luck to crack some of the toughest conundrums in living happily from and through music: stability at home, money, distribution, feeling and projecting onstage comfort, instrumental competency, and philosophical perspective. Not that I've mastered any of these -- but I'm basically fine with them all. The few performance-related difficulties that remain, those of routing and turnout and sound, seem modest by comparison, and are probably unimprovable since they haven't improved so far -- but for all that, they're still a thorn in my side, irksome enough to drain out-of-town performing of much of its pleasure. It seems I shall never be very happy. But this one week in January brought me quiveringly close.

5.  My twin nephews, Finnian and Patrick, ascended from an incision in my sister-in-law's abdomen in July, an event documented on a gripping youtube video. "Get that camera closer in," said the doctor to my brother as his wife lay gamely below. "You're gonna want to see this clearly." They say childbirth is a woman's game, and they say also that her work is never done, but, in this instance anyway, the men were doing all the hustling and toolwork and the woman just didn't look to be lifting a finger.

6.  I like to eat, and the two tastiest meals I had out were both in Chicago, at Irazu with my son Nick and at Kuma's with Mike Bub et al.

7. Eight words: Bill Frisell Jenny Scheinman Brian Blade Village Vanguard. Boy, do I love the music. Drugs and sex and words and pictures and fine food are of course delightful, but I'd take music over any of them without hesitation.

8. Speaking of music, sort of, I bought a ukulele in early December. A ukulele is something I only find the need for a few times a year, but I was tired of borrowing and felt that one would spruce up the old living quarters nicely. In nearby Evanston there's a shop called Hogeye that I turn to more and more these days. The fellow who runs it, Jim Craig, has one of those down-south dispositions that makes a visit to his store an easy and hyperbole-free non-adventure, unlike most metropolitan mercantile experiences and very unlike almost any store with guitars inside it. Oftimes there is even a hound dog streched over the banjo cases. This may be going too far. Anyway, Jim directed me to a uke of Chinese origin, at $400 neither cheap nor too dear, and I took the plunge. I also added to my small-ish collection a resonator guitar, earlier in the year. If all goes according to my demented plan I will die with dozens of transducer-free stringed instruments around me.

9.  Another renowned area of art foregone until this year was the work of Yasujiro Ozu. Corrected!

Amid all these good vibes, and at the risk of sounding a discordant note, I note with sorrow the death of Kristina Memarian, who was a longtime supporter of my music. When you travel from town to town and see a face pop up repeatedly, in places hundreds of miles apart, it's either a sign of some pathology threatening to break upon your shores or, in rarer cases, the opening of a peculiar but authentic relationship that, though it's founded on the non-mutual basis of the appreciation of the one for the professional life of the other, graduates somehow into friendship. Kristina was the second kind of person. I'd see her beaming face appear at the Opry in Nashville, at the Old Town in Chicago, or in the Bay Area, where she lived, and we would share a drink, a cigarette, and some laughs. For a while she concierged at a nice hotel in San Francisco, and more than a few of us down-market country musicians -- she loved country music, and Wayne Hancock above all -- got a good night's rest courtesy of her generosity. I wish her a good rest now.