Real Natural

Do you have a claim to fame?

It's one of my standard fallback questions that I developed from my days of hitchhiking in the quest of becoming an entertaining conversationalist. If the person can say yes to this question, it never fails to yield an interesting tale about who they are and what has been important to them.

A former teacher of mine is someone who claims he's the inspiration for the character made famous by R. Crumb in the hippie comics era. In fact, he even changed his name legally to become Mr. Natural. This confounds those who have him fill out forms because his first name is Mr.  That's right - not Mister, but Mr. with a period.


But Mr. Natural as a real person has further claims to fame beyond his name and how he became famous for having assumed it. For instance, under his previous name, he personally fought and he won a case as that shaped landlord/tenant rights in San Francisco.

Natural has written a book about his own way of teaching music. It's a sort of reverse engineered jazz theory for beginners based on "do-re-mi..."  He and his business partner Angel have published a pretty easy-to-understand disambiguation of a college level music theory course called "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers". He's uploaded many group courses on music from classes he recorded and put on youtube for many instruments. He even invented a short-cut for composers to sketch their musical ideas before the song makes it into notation that's an improvement on what's known as "Nashville Notation."

 So - do you have a claim to fame?
If you don't yet, what would it be when your ship comes in?

Front End Intuition

It's easy to assume that the sign of a "passion" or "intuitive flash" is something intense. As a kid I used have intense feelings of "yucky" about something that repelled me or made me want to rebel. But over the course of my life, I've realized the quality of an impression about what makes a person happy or is a signal of engaging a talent is just as often more curious and subtle than the opposite shocking and obvious "yuck!"




For me sometimes, it's many different qualities that signal something "important to me" is going on. Those qualities of Importance are also different for each person. Here's some examples:

•  Me noticing myself musing over what "sticks out" as a logical fallacy or "not fitting." I find my mind has jumped over to a completely daydreaming type track of thought, despite the attraction of real life.

•  Perhaps a sense of effortlessness, as if I've just forgotten to feel bad in the last recent period of time where something that I had just been doing makes me happy, because it has completely absorbed my attention.

• * It does sometimes happen fast, in a "flash." The quality of my attention suddenly jumps to attention that makes time artificially slow down into a focal point. This happens in movies when the script writer wants the audience to notice an important point in the plot line. (Usually accompanied in movies with a curious sucking sound or whiplash sound effect! But such sounds don't happen in real life.)

• * Sometimes I only notice something was important in hindsight, after a calamity where I "should have known" to pay attention to a clue I was given, but it went over my head at the time. An example of this came for me in a flash of intuitive prediction where I didn't know I was getting a self-preservation warning message until after the (fortunately minor) accident had happened. I had to think back what made that predictive thought different from any other paranoia...so I could recognize it and be certain enough to act on it to become for me the useful intuitive warning it was.

Apparently, listing more of these from other people would be useful.  Because I've talked about this very subject in dinnertime conversations as one of my favorite Dialogue subjects to trot out in polite conversation. The results of doing it quite often over the course of my life are that these qualities that help people recognize intuitive messages are completely unique to each person.

What have you noticed?

Enjoy Learning

When I was a kid, I learned by imitation; gaining rapport with my teachers was irresistible. When I was a teen, I learned by accident, in spite of myself. I was lucky to have teachers who accepted that I was learning while half asleep. Once I got to college, I began to learn by absorption - so I started to choose my teachers carefully because I realized I had no idea what I was absorbing. After college, I thought knew how to spot a fantastic teacher. I became fascinated with what makes a teacher worth the topic they're teaching.

For this community musical "Carnival" in 1989, I learned how to walk on stilts, how to juggle clubs, how to hang and build sets, install stage lighting and manage drama queens. There I am on the ladder.

Sometimes I would just learn whatever a fantastic teacher had to teach. Fantastic teachers seemed to bring out talents their students never knew they possessed. I had to admit that often what attracted me to being taught was trivial, irrelevant or downright foolish. It was only after my ignorance had subsided that I could say there was "a method to madness" for wanting to learn that particular thing. My tolerance extended for learning about something before making up my mind about its value. While learning, I gained and defined the value and use of what I'd gotten on the fly.

Absorption is still my favorite style of learning, because I realize that many people who attempt to teach come up with an explanation that doesn't really match what they actually do. It's the doing of something that I'm often interested in more than the explanation. People teach how they learned - if they take what they learned further, they often don't have ways to explain what they're really doing, so they use their former teacher's words. A learner sometimes needs to ignore that presentation, and get to the source in a more direct way.


What I mean by "absorption" is to merely open up as wide as possible to the skill that is being demonstrated. With absorbing, time of arrival or sequence does not matter. Pretend as if you can already do the skill, even though you are vastly inexperienced. Imitate everything you perceive - body language, attitude and facial expression. Cast your attention wide to take in as much as possible at once, and see if it's possible to juggle all these unknown factors. "Fake it 'til you make it." Count on "beginner's luck" to fill in the blank spots. You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing invested.

Since college, have always been able to learn from books. Surprisingly to me, this is rare. People seem to get a book to "have" the contents or refer to it, seldom do they get a book to really learn it. I outline a book if I think it's something I want to learn.  Learning using a book by outlining it can be done with a library book; it's cheaper than buying the book - and I have the contents that I want to use or remember after I outlined it.

The learning skill that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been to observe. Observation pays off when choosing a teacher; barefaced self observation allows faster learning. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which  it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience a subject first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view of how most people learn it. After that direct experience as a complete beginner, I'll understand what the classic solutions have answered. Sometimes confronting a subject directly will allow me to innovate beyond the classic learning procedures. Sometimes the way I give back to teachers is by asking them original questions that they haven't yet thought of asking themselves. The way to come up with these original questions is to note what puzzles you or fascinates as you first encounter the skill or subject, before you know what others think is "important" about it.

How do you learn best? What do you enjoy about learning?

Manifesto

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve 
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.
  
I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language  
to inspire, laugh & free you -  
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed. 
 
May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.
 
I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Multi-talented Issues

Soon I'm going to be painting windows again for Christmas holiday decorating. It's the most fun I can have and get paid to do it. I think working large is the kick for me - I'm not sure that the content matters for me, but the experience of putting a very large image on a nice, smooth surface is what floats my boat.

But now...now I'm wading through the problems getting the phone book completed - which involve a phone and DSL connection that is not working correctly. Usually I'd expect this to happen in Hawaii, but here, it's a real pain in the butt. So I have absolutely no time. I'm not sure that I like being so busy and so frustrated at the same time.

It's very similar to how I used to feel before I started to accept myself as a multi-talented person. I felt that I had no time and also that I was doing nothing but wasting my time - all at once. I think this comes from being in a Catch-22 situation where anything you commit yourself to takes away the possibility of doing something else. This is a question that electic multi-talented people constantly face.

It's as though when we walk in to a room - all of our projects are like greedy little gremlins that beg us to work on them, making us feel guilty for whatever we are doing. Me! Me! They scream at us in high pitched voices...

If you're interested to see the art I'm about to get to do on glass, I'll back post it when I'm done...