Stoned on Muse

[tmcg]

Saw Bohola and Danu on Friday night at the Bottom Line, in company with a couple of local musician friends and, as it turned out, a slew of people from Dempsey's, my old regular session. Both bands were outstanding. I loved the way Bohola would just Zen out on a tune or set, keeping it going for five minutes or ten minutes, working it like a substance, like clay. I loved the way Danu, with seven musicians to draw from, used artful combinations of instruments to vary their sound. I could have listened to Danu all night. The two-hour concert was way too short. (In case I get lazy and don't go find the code, Danu' should have a fada--an acute accent--over the u.)

On Saturday, hosted a rehearsal of yet another pickup band, formed from a pool of session musicians in response to a specific gig request. I like this musical polyamory, these situational groupings. This one consists of piano accordion, banjo, guitar, fiddle, whistle. Little bit rough, since we haven't played together enough (the session where we met is now defunct), and our repertoires and established sets differ a fair bit. But we worked up a draft set list. I think we'll do fine.

Sunday afternoon was writers' workshop. Meets once a month in the Village. Had only one story this time, then something completely different: a song to critique. The songwriter had emailed us a demo mp3 and a doc file of the lyrics. Although the critiques understandably tended to focus on the words, I think we gave decent feedback for newbies, and the song itself was a bit of a Rorschach blot, which led to some intriguingly varied interpretations. Then a guy who felt guilty that he hadn't produced a promised short story handed out a poem for an on-the-spot critique. We had him read it aloud, because one member hadn't brought reading glasses. Another workshop novelty: verse rather than prose, declaimed aloud, reacted to immediately rather than pondered in advance. Not only multimedia, but performance art too.

Thanks to traffic, got home just in time to turn around and head back out to my current regular session. Had some very pleasurable company on the way, and a very amusing revelation on the way home. The session was a lot of fun. I wasn't sure how the quality would be, since our regular guitarist and our favorite box player were on vacation and gigging, respectively; but the sound was satisfying, and the craic, as they say, was mighty. Even the drunken presumptive heckler who plopped himself down near us at the end turned out to be an okay guy, harmless and even entertaining. How often does that happen?

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm moving through all this (among other things, like the impending retirement of my transmission-weary elderly car) in a state of being only half here. The rest of me is always in the book I'm writing. I can feel my delayed reactions to questions, the processing lag as I comprehend ordinary statements. Mind keeps straining to go back and live in the book. I'm stoned on muse.

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