Caveat: Work in Progress! Biographic material subject to revision as things appear differently sometimes, when looking back, as time, unfolded, reveals me to me, as if I’m elsewhere and then it seems that I-today remembers me differently. I-today wasn’t present and what was sometimes humiliates me to consider. This line leads me to why am I here now? I have a human need for creative projects. I’m loved by my daughter, who is almost a sister.<\/p>\n
I didn’t understand the longterm impact of an emotion of disgust in the presence of an older person, a not wanting to be them; that I couldn’t imagine\u00a0becoming old and I didn’t want to. I also feared I would die very young. Thoughtlessly, I found myself on the threshold of my own age bias. Perceptions of age in this culture reflect the relationship of erotic love to power and it’s not a sliding scale.<\/p>\n
My feelings and the empirical evidence presume that life means something, I’ve given it thought and I rationally choose it despite the evidence. That I wait for things to change is a prayer. Then,\u00a0there’s music and reading and for some, who can afford it, whoring. The world would change direction if we subsidized sex work. A voucher system. There are epic possibilities for corruption. Expressions of anger and revenge would show up in new ways. A mini series.<\/p>\n
My character’s genetic structure must reflect at least a couple centuries of music and theatre. However, \u00a0the creative process is a form of madness and I had experiences of abandonment at unusual events in the early years. I’m always editing names. Memory delivers images of events that I describe using words, sometimes \u00a0imagined events. It’s helpful to know the difference and many times it’s hard to say. Memory is\u00a0not the interpreter but it remembers interpretations associated with emotions in different ways depending on the experience and awareness of the rememberer.<\/span><\/p>\n I remember when she went to work as a typist at the Philadelphia Navy yard in 1940, placing me in Loretta’s hands. But I didn’t know where she went nor what people did there. Yet I got how she felt about working at the place. She had literally left the house she and my father rented in Hollywood with my brother, who was 3 at the time. I was born in Chicago on a stop-over to Philadelphia.\u00a0I\u00a0met my father finally at the age of\u00a035, when I was on or just over the brink of divorce. He said he married, in sequence, three women, producing two children with each. I’m afraid that’s in the genes. I’ve felt the weight of karma, which endorses my underlying Jewish mentality.<\/span><\/p>\n Mother had no time and less energy nor a great desire to oversee temperamental\u00a0talent but she understood and even felt compassion for\u00a0its provenance, everything about her experience of my father disgusted her, including the music profession. I get\u00a0the efficacy of practicing scales\u00a0but I don’t do it well enough to be profitable. In my world, we have\u00a0technology that has allowed me to make distinctions in music with as much if not more attention, to hear the Bach in Mahler and v.v. Where would we be with technology if we couldn’t make it possible for a composer to create a symphony without his becoming a skilled\u00a0performer of an acoustic instrument? This is one of the reasons why I had to wait so long, longing sometimes for the day to come, surrounding myself with instruments I learned to make lovely sounds on but not to play. I avoid playing with others and\u00a0am generally,\u00a0uncool. I’ve been a demon for getting jobs done when I’m called upon to do and I’m mostly useful in creative work. I’ve been prescient as a writer, taking things to logical conclusions and remaining alert to changing circumstances.<\/span><\/p>\n When I was four years old, she had farmed my brother out to live with our uncle and moved us into the large flat above the store her mother’s second husband owned in Camden, New Jersey and I got to know black people when I wandered away when grandma was inattentive. My brother was unwanted by his aunt having to do with my brothers effect on his cousin, her son, who became\u00a0the chief administrator of a\u00a0significant psychiatric hospital.<\/span><\/p>\n So she moved us from my grandmother’s flat in a Jewish ghetto on Kaighns Avenue to a flat in a brownstone on\u00a0North 15th Street\u00a0in\u00a0Philadelphia. The three-story house was a long block north off Allegheny, on a corner of a cultural vortex\u00a0at the\u00a0intersecting boundaries of black, Irish Catholic, Protestant and Italian Catholic communities. No other Jews lived here. Kids played in their own communities and learned a xenophobic interest in those of other communities but there was no Jewish community in this intersection. I felt it was safer\u00a0to be invisible. It was a strategy to disappear, like a chameleon, hiding in the background, as I passed from world to world to world \u00a0walking to and from school.<\/span><\/p>\n With the experience of a chameleon not unlike Felix Krull, I commenced a life and even though it included assumptions of privilege of race and intellect and \u00a0even though fortune presented opportunities and even though I can’t avoid accomplishing whatever is set before me to do, I have felt\u00a0compelled to deprecate my natural talent and move forward as if methodically. In a high school, in Norwalk, California, I was identified by a perceptive teacher as a clever communicator and my mother began collecting trophies I’d win in\u00a0forensic\u00a0contests. It was thrilling to be emotionally committed and\u00a0emotionally detached in the performance. At Long Beach State College, I continued to compete and discovered sculpture and radio theater. I directed two and wrote two for the college radio program. I was in love but introduced to sex by a sexually avid 19 year old theater student from\u00a0Santa Ana. I was grateful also for the degree because I was starving at the time until a girlfriend arranged for me to get a job as a social worker, providing I got the diploma.<\/span><\/p>\n A couple years later, I met Anne Webster; shortly\u00a0before\u00a0I was fired from my job as a probation counselor by\u00a0the new manager of an LA County probation camp for emotionally disturbed male juvenile delinquents. They brought in Ira from Israel where he’d worked in\u00a0a \u00a0military boot camp. He wore khaki and introduced the camp to the Israeli tough love approach to behavior modification. Since I had \u00a0more in common with the\u00a0juvenile charges we oversaw, I didn’t fit Ira’s pictures. I was in angst over a woman I adored,\u00a0who didn’t want to know I existed, not that I could have changed that then.<\/p>\n Had I\u00a0read Don Quixote then, as my girlfriend’s mother suggested, I wouldn’t\u00a0have recognized myself anyway. \u00a0I don’t remember what inspired it but I went to Puerto Vallarta \u00a0by train and bus and when I returned, I moved into a house in Santa Monica with Anne. 1967 was not a bad year, give or take Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam war.<\/p>\n Anne introduced me to Bu\u00f1uel, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini and so on.\u00a0<\/span>It occurred to me that, if a storteller can show photographic images in addition to the audio, making a narrative fiction in film is a piece of cake and the universe smiled and agreed. I began making films first for use in elementary school classrooms.\u00a0<\/span>Viewers followed my stories, young children and black people; especially. When I was 11 years old, I was the only white male\u00a0at Gillespie Junior High School, which later led\u00a0to a connection with John Birks (Dizzy) \u00a0Gillespie and a tour to Upsala with him and Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Thelonius Monk, Ben Webster, Don Cherry, Sahib Shihab.<\/p>\n Several years later,\u00a0after Anne and I had split up and I was in LA and she and my daughter lived\u00a0in Oakland, I had an idea for a movie based on a \u00a0magic building but, instead of producing\u00a0the story, I got Xerox to help me make\u00a0the building. My chameleon act: “Can you do that?” “Sure I can do that”” The media called the building\u00a0the most intelligent building in the world, an oxymoron. McGraw Hill published my book about it, called, Architectonics. I discovered that I can write pretty good. \u00a0I then led a new nonprofit corporation in San Diego and before I knew it, I’d developed hundreds of homes affordable to families of people with whom I have nothing in common but my human physical form, not unlike those around whom I grew up in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey.<\/p>\n In the morning of February 17,<\/span>\u00a01997, during my daily 7 A.M. run on the beach, I fell\u00a0unconscious into the Pacific Ocean due to oxygen starvation in my brain when the aortic\u00a0valve didn’t open sufficiently. I\u00a0regained consciousness as the blood rushed to my head when I was floating face down in the water. For a few minutes, although I was, in a sense, awake, my eyes took in the view of sand settling below the surf, I had no memory.. “I” simply didn\u2019t occur. Nothing occurred. I felt\u00a0nothing but a sense of awe. No desire, no regret, no pain, no judgment, I felt\u00a0lucid, satisfying sensation. As my eyes scanned \u00a0trees and residences along the bluff above the beach, I felt vague familiarity and curiosity. My attention came to rest\u00a0on a large, round window in the gable of a grey clapboard house. It\u2019s peculiar shape connected with the name of the neighbor\u00a0who designed that house. As her\u00a0name occurred to me, my life came tumbling back\u00a0to me through that round window like a tornado in reverse motion. I thought, in the words of Jackie Gleason, \u201cPow! Right in the kisser!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Following a “pulmonary autograft procedure” (open heart surgery), my heart was successfully reconstructed. The medical profession is unable to acknowledge the post traumatic stress disorder created by terrifying medical procedures, leaving parents to their psychological fate, which varies depending on the patient’s immediate family and I had none. Systematically, I gave up everything, though I tried to keep my dignity. I gave up human relationship. I gave up my home and I drove off, heading north from Del Mar in an old pickup truck with a camper shell, with a dog and a cat. A year later, when I was camping alone, in a 1973 Southwind RV, in a redwood forest 13 miles from Ft. Bragg in Mendocino County, first the cat and then the dog died. I then truly had nothing and it wasn\u2019t any better that\u00a0I knew I had nothing, however, there was a stark authenticity about it that reminded me of my experience on the beach in Del Mar that day when I didn\u2019t remember anything.<\/span><\/p>\n The road into the place, where I camped in Jackson State Forest was an ancient logging road that winds down the side of a canyon from Highway 22 to a tributary of the Noyo. The road is a litany of jarring potholes and bone rattling rocks constantly overturned\u00a0by logging trucks. Twisting ruts deepened\u00a0in frequent rains and then filled with dust again when it was dry. \u00a0The occasional pile of bear shit and fallen branches added surprise and color each day but I grew to know that road “like\u00a0the back of my hand”. I timed the four miles of ruts, rocks and hairpin turns above precipitous drops and tried to beat my time from camp to highway and highway to camp. \u00a0At speed,\u00a0sound and movement became rhythmic and, my brain, soaked in adrenalin, gave me a short-lived feeling of being alive. It was at the start of one of these trips, when I was taking Bear (the dog) to a vet, that\u00a0I first\u00a0heard the music.<\/span><\/p>\n At first I thought I only remembered the Can Can<\/em> from Offenbach\u2019s Tales of Hoffman.<\/em>\u00a0I was frightened,\u00a0when I\u00a0couldn’t make the music stop. Then the music stopped when I stopped the truck at the stop sign at 22, starting again when I turned onto the highway. \u00a0I could stop listening to the music by putting my attention on something else, but the music continued. When I focused on the music, I could hear all the instruments and I found I could change the tempo and I began playing with the arrangement and orchestration.<\/span><\/p>\n By now, I’ve read Oliver Sacks studies of patients in his book,\u00a0Musicophilia<\/em>\u00a0(Random House,2007) but when this happened, I had a thought that going mad is\u00a0unfairly criticized that being nuts isn’t so bad. That I heard the Can Can <\/em>seemed\u00a0profoundly ironic. \u00a0It started at the instant the truck\u00a0started and it only\u00a0stopped at\u00a0the completion of a perfect cadential phrase and I would carefully stop the truck and modify the tempo towards this end. \u00a0I experimented with\u00a0turning the music on and off while imagining driving. Tales of Hoffman<\/em> was the first piece of theatrical music I heard, when my mother left me in the care of my grandmother and I played with her Victrola records.<\/span><\/p>\n I’m astonished and a little bitter thinking about my long unacknowledged capacity for creation of music, like an unrequited love denied through a lifetime of emotional poverty, persisting \u00a0through all my careers during my time as a chameleon. How remarkable that during all those years, I\u2019d always owned and toyed with instruments. For several years, when I lived in Canada, there were five pianos in my home and a bass viol, vibraphone, several guitars, flutes and some drums. I played them for fun and relaxation. And I\u00a0often chose the company of musicians, whom I envied \u00a0for making\u00a0a living doing what they loved to, but also, I envied them their musical ability. I felt intuitively that I could learn to play but I\u2019d never learn to use an instrument like Casals, Miles or Ellington. I was resigned that I wouldn’t make music.<\/span><\/p>\n Offenbach’s Can Can<\/em> is a musical rendering\u00a0of Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s vision of The Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em>. When I moved out of the forest and into an RV Park in Ft. Bragg. I also began to suspect\u00a0that my interest is music was a message. In light of\u00a0my fascination with music since those early days with my Grandmother’s Victrola,, it seems\u00a0strange that I avoided taking it up seriously. But it makes perfect sense that I should feel as I do for I knew no other way to develop knowledge and ability with music except by mastering an instrument because this is conventional knowledge. Ask any music teacher in any school anywhere. Nevertheless, my ambition has always been to conduct the philharmonic and while I\u2019d avoided any serious study of music, my experience of the most complex\u00a0harmony grew intuitively. To not study music now was no longer an option. Offenbach’s high kicking line of dancers launched me into my career.<\/span><\/p>\n It seems astounding that\u00a0five years later, I\u2019ve earned an MFA in composition. I\u2019ve deconstructed and recreated works of Bartok, Bach, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven and I’ve learned enough about Arabic Maqam, Indian Carnatic and traditional Chinese music to understand and use their idiomatic forms. Most importantly, I feel satisfied when I\u2019m writing music.<\/span><\/p>\n Much of what I\u2019ve learned about music has been through reading, taking classes and learning how to listen acutely but my progress has been mostly empowered by new professional audio software for programming midi mainly using samples sold by Vienna Symphonic Instruments. Years of dedicated practice might allow a gifted musician to play in a symphony orchestra but you can learn more about a complex piece when you program the shape of each\u00a0note by each\u00a0instrument. This technology allows you to stand on the practice of all music ever by anyone anywhere and anytime.<\/span><\/p>\n The best part of this story is my journey in music has only just begun.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Caveat: Work in Progress! Biographic material subject to revision as things appear differently sometimes, when looking back, as time, unfolded, reveals me to me, as if I’m elsewhere and then it seems that I-today remembers me differently. I-today wasn’t present and what was sometimes humiliates me to consider. This line leads me to why am … Continue reading Someone asked how I became a composer so late in life.<\/span>