Audio post - Played 12 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]This is a recording of one of the few times I’ve played my music on a stage. It was after a poorly attended poetry reading at the M-Shop in Ames, IA, November 11, 1999.
I edited out two mistakes. (I left many others in.)
I called it my Iowa concert.
In an evening class, I implore myself to narrow and stick to a theme.
http://www.theperfectcompany.com/formerintent/index.htm?1_M
October 25, 2004
Audio post - Played 13 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]In 2003, I started to record a new album. A lot of life happened, and the album is far from finished, primarily because I haven’t had a steady living situation. For a few years now, my recording equipment has been in and out of storage, as have the requisite parts of my personality.
My intent was/is to make a more hopeful album. A narrative that rises, falls, dips and sways.
That’s why the first track is called Hope Song.
At the Squirrel Cage, a few pitchers were shared to celebrate the launch of People’s Jeans.
People’s Jeans are a unique fashion option for the ethically minded individual who doesn’t want to sacrifice “looking good” for “feeling right.” This high quality denim line is made exclusively in developing countries where workers have a fervor for feeling fabulous! Before shipment to industrialized countries, each pair of jeans is worn by a local immigrant for a number of weeks, giving the jeans an aged, tired look without bleaching. Your People’s Jeans may have even been worn by the immigrant worker who helped manufacture them!
Real People. Real Jeans.
In a universally neglected school for children with special needs in Brownsville, Brooklyn, 10-year-old Jordan was the closest thing the school had seen to a star. Against a backdrop of apathetic teachers, exhausted specialists, and surrendered children, Jordan weaved his motorized wheelchair through the hallways with a gleeful independence typically reserved for what the world would call an able, cognizant, or responsible adult.
Unfortunately on normal days, his cognizant teachers had no qualms about leaving Jordan in a powerless wheelchair, in which he could not wander, could not approach selected windows, could not turn his back in frustration, and could not accidentally or jokingly run over the tips of someone’s shoes. It was easier this way. I briefly became known as a pesty advocate for Jordan’s electric wheelchair. By title, I’m a speech-language pathologist, but I saw and see clearly the connection between one’s ability to communicate and one’s ability to go where one wants to go.
When I met Jordan, he was successfully using a Dyanvox Augmentative Communication System. But as a language enthusiast/idealist, I petitioned for Jordan to receive a Prentke-Romick Vantage as a way to target Jordan’s language/cognitive development. Our sessions were spent encouraging Jordan to demonstrate and exercise his ability to construct meaningful short sentences using Bruce Baker’s trademarked semantic compaction.
Jordan was a proud learner, but our sessions were recreational to him. I wish I would have been less frustrated by his lack of enthusiasm to learn. At it’s earliest stages, communication is hard work. For this reason, anticipating a child’s needs will diminish her desire to communicate. With special needs children, communication is VERY hard work. But because of their frailty, the community’s desire to anticipate their needs dramatically increases. This is an essential difficulty for a speech-language pathologist whose job it is to improve a child’s responsivity and communicative independence. Jordan could comfortably get by on the charm of his smile. When he came to school with no voice (a dead battery in his device), he was still happily fed.
I thought Jordan deserved a better education. I modified a standardized language test for him, allowing us to conclusively prove his intelligence to the most disinterested staff in the school. Jordan’s understanding and expression of morphology was understandably deficient, given his inability to practice and participate in the construction of verbal sentences, but his cognitive skills exceeded those of his cognitively impaired classmates. I was thrilled with the results, but when I wrote the report, his mother expressed reserved displeasure. How could her son, who “understood everything that was said to him,” possibly have receptive and expressive language skills several years his younger? He was entirely her world. Her only son. His nickname was “King.”
Some children would press their heads into the beads. Some would drift in and out of sleep. Some would spit and slobber in response to the dancing chicken I’d place on the table just outside of their reach. But Jordan would delight in seeing me twice a week, delight in locating vocabulary words in his device, delight in answering simple questions about color, size, and shape. Sometimes we practiced telling simple jokes. His laughter stopped everyone, for each moment, from being so cynical.
For a while, Jordan’s favorite initial expression was “Teeth… hurt…” I took him to the nurse’s room twice for this, but what could they do? Pain is a subjective symptom, and he couldn’t be more specific. I wonder now if this was a precursor of what was to come.
In the fall, I had moved on to another school, and in November, (fifteen days after Mary’s death), I received an email from a former colleague saying that Jordan was in the hospital. He had bone cancer and wasn’t expected to live much longer.
I went to the funeral soon after. A month later, his mother sent me a grief-stricken note thanking me. She didn’t include a return address to which I could respond.
At the school, a wave of sadness and complexity washed over some of the teachers. I’m sure the other children felt it too, the absence of a dimmed star student bringing well-wanted pleasure to every station he visited.
I remember, in the tiny funeral home, in his short casket, Jordan’s body wore a tie. He looked like a happy, gentle king.
Audio post - Played 26 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]When I saw Sari over the summer, I was frustrated that I couldn’t play “Don’t Be Shy” for her. I knew the song consisted of about three chords, but I couldn’t figure it out spontaneously.
Turns out it’s a difficult song to play and sing at the same time. The rhythm is surprisingly tricky to maintain. A-E-D-E if you want to try it.
I put this together Friday night for Sari’s birthday. My recording equipment has been in storage for more than a year, so I used a digital voice recorder to capture and transport the tracks one at a time, and used an old version of Cool Edit Pro to layer the voices and add some effects. It’s a patch job.
Cat Stevens wrote the song for Harold and Maude, which remains one of my favorite movies. Sometimes I feel like Harold. Sometimes I feel like Maude.
In 2002, Pearl gave me a blank book for my birthday that she had received from a print-maker friend from PSU. Since that time, I’ve carried the book to various bedrooms where it has stood on primary shelves or has rested in the most important of brown moving boxes.
Starla, a character who emerged in 2001, wanted something more substantial than to exist on the edge of class notes or on bar napkins. Her story appears here as it unfolded.
While the first three-fifths of pages were drawn sporadically from 2002 to 2008, the last 20 pages were completed in 2009.
The book is dedicated to my best friend Mary, who died in 2006.
This is a love story.
http://www.theperfectcompany.com/starla_and_crman/index.htm?1_M
