Sit around and be resentful about not being in Connecticut amidst my beloved forest & new friends, even as winter set in, because I want to be there for Connecticut in winter

OR

have fun in LA.

I chose fun: playing tennis, writing, hanging out with my wife, reading, loafing, riding public transit, and one of the most fun things of all — playing music with my friend and neighbor Jim.

There I was walking up our sidewalk to tack a flyer on the local library bulletin board for my latest pop-up bookclub, this one for How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy — when I met Jim tending his front yard garden.

He said, “We should play together!”

These are the sweetest words anyone can ever say to me, and he said them out of purest kismet. I hadn’t said anything about playing yet. Jim just knew.

I said Yes, Let’s. What I really meant was thank you thank you thank you. I had been putting those flyers up all over for weeks and not getting any bites.

I was nonetheless reading How to Write One Song and doing what it said. Free associating. Making lists of phrases that spoke to me from my daily jottings, cutting them up into little pieces,

morning chuckle, hippie freedom genie lantern, mushroom lamp bubble punctured by a cat

putting the pieces into a paper bag, pulling them out one by one, seeing if that made a song.

Nope.

None of the exercises generated anything like the song I thought I would write if I wrote songs. This song would be like “I Am a Rock” by Simon & Garfunkel and also like a Pavement song I’ve never even heard of, but the Pavement influence would be in there.

Nothing like that materialized, but I did take the baby step of considering the possibility of writing a song, which previously had felt like something I would by no means ever do, like ski jumping.

Now I was jotting down phrases like “I’m walking in my underwear.” That could be a song. It could be a good song. I haven’t written it yet, though.

The song that did come out is a complete surprise. I had no idea it was in me, but it is true and real. And having written and sung it, I feel fresh and new.

I owe this good feeling to Jim.

I have learned more from him than I consciously know. It’s that kind of thing where you realize years later that the reason you’re doing something well is because of the person who taught you.

One thing I do realize I got from Jim is the importance of starting with a steady beat. I had always known unsteadiness was a fundamental flaw in my drumming. Yes it expressed joy. But was it on the beat?

Nyet, nyet, triple-nyet. My drumming was all over the place. Jim said, let’s get a simple beat down and take it from there. When he put it that way, it finally sank in, and I started practicing much more with a metronome.

Jim also taught me the musical value of not playing at all. This was to gently correct my tendency to overdrum. For this lesson, he told me a story about his brother. His brother once asked him the musical question, “When the left fielder backs up a ground ball cleanly fielded by the third baseman, is he still playing?”

Ah. That made sense.

I further admired Jim’s being open-minded and serious about all my flights of fancy, starting from when I proposed to make up for my lack of a drum kit by banging on a bike stand. He also encouraged my harmonica playing.

I love Jim. He has a strict aesthetic about how many raven calls to include on any song. That number is one.

At the session where we made this song, which I call “Our Street Song,” I totally intended for the beat to be on 2 and 4, 2 and 4, 2 and 4, 2 and 4. But sometimes I get nervous. Also, the DAW I record this stuff on is tricky! It is like riding a mechanical bull. This is why despite my practicing to a metronome, the beat still wanders all over the place, re-enacting my meandering along our sidewalk, taking pictures of our pretty street.

And yet Jim navigated though my unbeat, picking his way into a beautiful groove that reminds me of the soaring mandolins on “Maggie May” and all those other great songs on Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart.

After laying down all this luscious guitar. Jim said, “We should have some vocals to put on top of that.” I said I have lyrics! I had written down doggerel about every plant I took a picture of. It is the silliest stuff you could imagine. That’s what I sang. I don’t hear Paul Simon or Pavement in there. I hear my heart.

OTHER HOMEMADE NEWS

People!

I have this story coming out in

Citric Acid

about my latest quest —

visiting every botanical garden in Orange County, mainly by public transit.

This story is lush with splendor, what Mark Twain would write if he wrote like me.

My wife… is a subscriber …

Homemade Newspaper is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What? No one said anything about rain. Snow, yes; snow everywhere except LA. I really wished I could have been there in Connecticut for 22 inches of snow, but no, my role is to be here in LA basking in the sunshine. I was down to bask but now what’s this? Rain?

What can I do now? It’s a question a lot of people are asking and not just about the weather, but let’s stay on topic. I decided to go for walk. Mail a letter, pick up a prescription. One foot in front of the other.

This soon led to renewed appreciation of the beauty of my neighborhood. You are beautiful. You are beautiful. You are beautiful, too. That’s what I think and feel about the trees and flowers when I walk around my neighborhood in Mar Vista between Culver City and Venice.

I also feel love for landmarks that are not exquisite architecture but are like stalagmites of every time I’ve ever waited for a bus or gone to the library or farmer’s market here. The Yum-Yum Donuts sign, so purple. The Bryan Hawkins Ken-Po Karate sign: there’s just something heart-ache-y in a good way about its grandiosity, its bound-to-fall-ness. That sign is our local Ozymandias.

Speaking of ruins, I love the dilapidated payphones of my neighborhood. No one is ever going to call anyone from those phones again, yet there they still are. Who doesn’t love a post-industrial ruin? I take heart nowadays in all things this too shall pass.

I was digging the clip clop of my walking pace. My daughter Lilly recently turned me on to the music of Ella Jenkins, who does a song for kids called “Different Rhythms.” She lists all kinds of things that are rhythm: the farmer hoeing a field, the wave crashing on the shore. Walking is a rhythm, Ella Jenkins sang so clearly a child could understand. Her song stayed with me as I clip-clopped along to the pillbox percussion in my front pocket after I picked up my prescription.

I wondered if my sister Anne, a great North Jersey keyboardist and piano teacher, might like to lay down some long-distance piano to accompany my pictures from this stroll. Very happily she did, as you can hear in the walking blues so jauntily accompanying the video.

Clip-clop, clip-clop like a goat in some other children’s song, I clambered up Grand View taking pictures of everything beautiful. This was a lot. Highlights include a rusty proud old Ford truck, and a dragon tree juxtaposed with red powderpuff, yes, you heard that right, powderpuff, Calliandra haematocephala.

The sign at St. Bede’s — “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God” — really resonated with me. That’s why I added the clang of the lid I bought the other day at the National Council of Jewish Women thrift store on Venice, on the happy intuition that I would soon be needing a pot lid to clang.

The snow family basking at the end is me sending love to everyone out there in the cold.

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This all came about courtside at Ladera Park. I was pursuing my hobby of trying to guess what band is playing the funky song Chris has going on his boombox. “Everytime I turn around I’m back in love again” — is that Grover Washington? Chris was like, please. Is it Con Funk Shun? That’s a better quality guess, he said, and allowed a clue: the band’s name is an acronym.

Oh in that case I have no idea, I confessed, so he told me, L.T.D. Of course! This led us into a discussion of how obsessed he is with his new synthesizer and how hours pass like seconds while he is getting the sustain just right. Same-same-same I confirmed, regarding my own full-psyche immersions into multi-tracking percussion I find by banging on things in the street.

Send me something, Chris said, and I pounced at the opportunity, which you can hear on this track as me pounding a big round plastic stability ball with a baseball bat. It was a privilege and honor to see Chris and Jack take it from there into this swirling chunky minute of delight.

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First, we gotta play Game 7 to find out who wins the World Series. This is what I always say about every game. You gotta play the game to find out. How other than by playing Game 6 would you know that the otherwise game-tieing hit, almost certainly leading to the Blue Jays walk-off triumph, instead gets wedged in the fence. To be followed by an almost no-percent of happening, game-ending line-out double-play.

But those things did happen and no matter what happens in Game 7, they are a great start on hope springing eternal. Who knows what will happen? This is my solace when living through what often feels like a dark period of history. You gotta play the games to find out.

So will the Dodgers unclench and let their talent sing? Will the Blue Jay’s last-to-first, Oh Canada vibe prevail? We are soon to have found out. And then what?

Here comes late autumn, almost all the maple leaves gone but the poplars and oaks extending their exquisite benediction. My mom was just visiting up here in Connecticut saying that bare trees are nature’s sculpture. That really changed my mindset from no-no-no-no, I don’t want this to be over, to: okay — bring it on.

“It” being, things to do when there’s no baseball. Songwriting, maybe. I am thinking about reverse-engineering some of my favorite songs and have, in fact, already started with Townes Van Zandt's “To Live is To Fly.” It’s a kitchen-sink goodbye song. He says all sorts of things, just lets it all out as it comes, but sometimes with jewel-like rhymes. My favorite part is when he says, “I’ll miss the system here / The bottom’s low and the treble’s clear.” He’s saying goodbye to the PA system at a club.

Surprising!

Next up is “My Old School” by Steely Dan because of this one great line that opens the second stanza: “Oleander.” That’s it. Just “Oleander.” There’s lots of storytelling in that song and they say stuff after “Oleander” — it’s growing outside a free-spirited college student’s dorm room — but the convoluted story is untold. What stays with us for decades is the precise imagery and phrasing (and Hall of Fame cowbell). Can you imagine what it would be like to start a stanza so perfectly?

I really can’t, but I’m game to try. Just like I’m game to wade through all these pain-in-the-brain commercials just to see if Teo Hernández can hold off on swinging at that way-outside third strike. I swung at many a way-outside third strike in my Sunday League career, and never once did I do it on purpose. I feel for him. But still, I’m like: Teo! C’mon!

I’ll miss having baseball players’ failures to bemoan and their successes to cheer. You shoulda heard me when Miguel Rojas caught that throw from Kiké Hernández. I didn’t even know I had it in me. I’m a Mets fan, born within a few miles of then under-construction Shea Stadium. I’d be fine with the Blue Jays winning because my friends who are Blue Jays fans are beautiful people and Canada is a beautiful country. But deep down inside there is a Dodger fan who bellows with pleasure when they win.

Bellowing with pleasure is good, and having lived in Los Angeles for most of my adulthood and seen far more Dodger games live than any other team, I hope LA prevails. Either way, on the afternoon of Game 7, I am glad to have swatted a slightly rotting pumpkin with a big ol’ bittersweet vine back into the patch where it came from, potentially to overwinter and grow into new fresh beautiful pumpkin vines. What you see in this video is my first swing of the season, coming off the bench just in time to position myself for a productive off-season — and I wish the same + more to you.

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This was our third and most transcendent yet rehearsal of our nascent Stereolab cover band, which puts it way up there, as the first two get-togethers were exhilarating and life-affirming. Such is the joy!

What made it extra sublime this time was the two-note synth loop I coaxed out of my old laptop, seen here propped up with a boombox on logs fresh cut from the forest behind the barn where we not only play but cavort.

Thanks to my wife for the vivid videography!

All we really need now are some lilting off-kilter French vocalists, as well as who-knows-what-other X factors of delight. Then we will be ready to transcend further still, to the next stage, bandstand or kiosk. We’re open to anyone — experience, talent, don’t worry! — who’s either up to jam in and around the northwest corner of Connecticut or else takes a free-form approach to geography & collaboration. If that sounds like you, holler!

I brought my drumsticks and a coffee can.

This was the second meeting of “Groovin’ at the Depot,” an open mic and sing-along at the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company in North Canaan, Connecticut, next to the train depot. I brought my snare drum to the first meeting, so leaving early was conspicuous. To make it even more conspicuous, I gave a little speech about how I had to go because my wife was making spaghetti and meatballs, but I wanted to at least show up in support of the values expressed by the flyer:

· Make new friends through playing and enjoying music

· Learn how to become a better musician

· Enjoy the benefits of playing and listening to music

· Share your musical experience with others

· Discover that life is better with music.

That’s all so positive, fun, and community-minded. So there I was coming back like I said I would to the second meeting, locking my bike to a bench while three white-haired women took turns ringing the depot bell. It’s a good old-fashioned train station bell that you pull on with a rope so everyone can hear it loud and clear.

“You sound great,” I said while taking my coffee can and drumsticks out of my bike panniers. It’s a shiny silver Illy can that my wife said made great coffee. She always says this about every cup I make her every morning, and it always makes me feel great.

I sat down in the second row of a meeting room full of vintage accordions, sunlight, and apple cider donuts.

In the first row was a woman with a traveling fiddle. It looked sturdy and streamlined.

“It sounds great,” she said, “especially on the low notes.”

“I bet when you play it sounds great on all the notes,” I either said or wish in retrospect to have said. The important thing is we were sharing our musical experience and making friends.

Paul Ramunni is the avuncular owner and operator of the accordion museum. He got things started by saying, “An accordion is the only instrument that will not work unless you hug it first.” This may or may not be completely accurate. Don’t you have to hug a tuba? Bagpipes? I didn’t think of any of that at the time, though. Hugging music sounded good.

Paul explained about how an accordion works, involving air, reeds, and buttons you have to play on faith because you can’t see them. He launched into “Roll Out the Barrel,” which sounded like every previous performance of “Roll Out the Barrel” in all of polka history, distilled into the sunlight in the meeting room on this late summer Sunday afternoon.

A brave person came up after Paul asked who would be brave and come up first. This guy also played accordion. He had a hawk-like but not mean face. He looked like a kind hawk in a children’s book who has the courage to suggest to the other hawks, why must we always be ruthless predators? Why must we make the other animals live in fear? Instead, why don’t we make new friends through playing and enjoying music?

He played a Polish song, “Farewell to My Homeland.” I leaned forward to listen and not worry about what I would do with my drumsticks and coffee can – even though, now that you mention it, I had never played music by myself in front of thirty people before. By not worrying, I came up with an idea.

I let some more people go ahead of me because even though I liked my idea, I recognized that it was gonna be trippy. The vibe was like a church gathering of nice, mainly older people, and I didn’t wanna freak everybody out.

While I bided my time, a boy came up, stuffed into a bowtie, but not looking at all uncomfortable. He plopped himself and his accordion down in a swivel chair and grinned like he knew a great joke he couldn’t wait to tell. He played “Three Blind Mice” for 20 seconds, then another song I didn’t recognize for another 20 seconds. You can’t Shazam these things; you have to feel them. For his last song, also 20 seconds, he swiveled, fast-fast-fast, swivel-swivel-swivel.

Nothing exactly like that ever happened before or ever will again. I’m so glad we were all there to experience it together. After him, my new friend with the traveling fiddle came up and said, “We’re all playing songs from our heritage, so I want to play you this sad song from Finland.” To me, it was more pensive than sad. Her second song was jaunty. She stopped at certain points, telling us it was our turn to shout “Hey!”

Together, we all shouted “Hey!” and then low-key looked at each other, like, how ‘bout that, pretty good huh, and we’re just getting started. This was my cue to go next because my idea also involved audience participation.

I got up and said, “I want to teach you how to soul clap. That’s when you clap in eighth notes, one-ee-and-uh, for four straight beats.” I had just read about this in a terrific book about why people like the kind of music they like, called This is What it Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas.

“I’ll do it first on my coffee can. First on one side, which sounds ping-y, then again on the other side, which is more thump-y, and then we’ll all do it together.”

Do it we did. It was a triumph, and I also learned a lesson. When you are playing the coffee can, it’s best to not try and balance it on one knee, but instead to hold it between both knees. Then everything will go fine.

Here is how fine things went. Next came a guitarist who said he forgot the iPad he always uses when he plays in front of people.

“But there is one song I know by heart – ‘Sloop John B,” he said, “so that’s the one I’m going to play. Maybe the drummer will help me.”

That’s me! I’m the drummer!! Can you believe it!!! I walk into a room of 30 people where it’s like church – and I’m the drummer. What an honor. What a transformation. I am not now who I was when I walked in. Now, I’m the drummer.

I let the guitar player do his thing for the first verse and then came in on the chorus with backbeats, a thump and thump, just to let him know I heard and accepted his invitation. Then on the next chorus I added a calypso flourish I did not know I had in me. But there it was there when we needed it, inspired by musical togetherness.

Up next, a flute player and a guitarist. They played “Shine,” written in the 1910s and later popularized by Louis Armstrong. It was sweet but a little quiet until the flute-player said, “We need that drummer!”

I thumped them a lick tasty as apple cider donuts, also improvised on the spot, as inspired by the musical community.

That was it for drumming on the day. You do not want to over-drum. The groovin’ meanwhile continued, with an accordion rendition of “Morning Has Broken” that we all sang together on the inside and an autoharp rendition of “Ripple” that we all la-da-di-dah’d together on the outside.

Paul closed us out with “God Bless America.”

I shook his hand afterwards and thanked him for organizing.

He replied, “The coffee can isn’t big enough.”

I tensed up. Was this positive, fun, and community-minded?

Yes, it was.

“Next time, bring a garbage can.”

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PS Another reason I went to “Groovin’ at the Depot” was to recruit musicians for my Stereolab cover band. I think an accordion-driven Stereolab cover would sound great!

I remember looking up at a majestic shady tree while devouring a sandwich with good bread at Build Coffee in Chicago, where my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter live — wondering as I always do, what kind of tree is that? And when my tree ID app said basswood, I said, I never heard of basswood before but now it will always remind me of being here with my family in its shade, tucking into this big two-handed sandwich.

The rest of this outfit is mostly about keeping ticks off. People do not make light of ticks here in the Northwest Corner. They get you too sick in too many ways. I douse my skin and clothing in repellant before I venture into the woods and check my body back and front, upside and down after I get back inside. NO TICKS! That is the safety goal but I also have an emergency dose of doxycycline ready in case one of those bloodsuckers breaks through and latches on. Doxycycline is like the morning-after pill for tick bites. I want to stay strong as long as I can.

You might notice it takes me a beat or three to access the word “basswood.” This is the third take! I just stood there flummoxed in the first two, unable to summon the name of the tree I spend hours each day thinking about. Nouns are increasingly like moose in these Connecticut woods: reclusive. Just like with so many things these days, I gotta give ‘em time.

Sometimes I am in a frenzy of forest stewardship. I’ve been out there on a 90-degree day in sweat-drenched overalls, thinking, “Buddy, we gotta get you inside STAT.” Hacking down all those invasives builds a particular momentum which I would describe as kill, kill, kill.

It’s death to the bad plants and life for the good plants. This is a stark divide and I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing, especially as I get overheated. Clearing out invasives is not all there is to forest stewardship, but it is an essential first step and I have plenty of invasives to clear. So instead of spending my days in woe about the state of the country and world, I hack down invasives to provide habitat for wood thrush, a bird whose population is in decline. This lets me feel that I am doing something even as I wonder if it’s enough and if not, what is?

A forester at Great Mountain Forest near my house taught me how to identify Morrow’s honeysuckle by clipping a branch and looking at its center. “If the branch is hollow, it has nothing to offer,” he said.

This has really stayed with me. I don’t want to be hollow. I want to have something to offer.

Yeah, that’s where it’s at. I really do want the forest to be a good place in 20 years and beyond, and to connect and work together with folks who share this goal.

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I interviewed Grant about his Top 5 songs from 1991, his most formative years of music as a precocious high schooler. The combination of joy, delight and affection he takes in talking about these songs creates its own hooky melody, a thoughtful mixtape-by-conversation about “Pretty Paper” by Green Day, “Tommy the Cat” by Primus, “(Beginning of What’s About to Happen) Hwy 74 by Kyuss, “Pease Porridge,” by De La Soul, and “Jesus Christ Pose” by Soundgarden.

Grant’s tunes were a lot more high-energy than the singer-songwriter stuff I played on headphones at that age. It gave me a pleasurable jolt to tune in. I totally relate to how he talks about defining himself through music, and the satisfaction of hearing your daughter dig the music you loved as a kid and keep on loving now.