I wrote what is probably my most extensive and exhaustive piece in six months here.
Monthly Archive for August, 2008
Because he got a professional smoker for his birthday (and because I chose to indulge him with an industrial meat grinder), Chef is learning to make sausage.
And because he is learning to make sausage, this means we’re about to have a bunch of salami hanging from the rafters in the basement.
And yes, we have four cats.
And because he is learning to make sausage, this means we have sausage casings all over the house.
And by “sausage casings” I mean “pig intestines”.
And by “all over the house”, I mean “in the bottom drawer of the fridge” and “hanging from the rafters in the basement”, which is more than enough.
I’d be vegetarian again if I could — except for the homemade, local, delicious, chorizo sausage thing — just to avoid the phrase “pig intestine”, i.e. “sausage casing”, i.e. “Fuck! Where are the cats?”, in daily conversation.
Ethan was coming to a stage in his piano where he was bored with lessons and practice and books with no outright goals or personal creativity. The books given to younger kids are filled with ideas and lessons that don’t have the leeway for improvisation. I brought up an idea to the piano teacher a few weeks ago, where Ethan is rewarded for diligent practice by getting to pick out sheet music to learn. She saw where I was going with the idea — rewarding the student by bringing the student back into the subject — and suggested a few sites that offer cheap sheet music downloads. Ethan knew the song from Shrek, and I quickly set him straight about the song’s origins and interpretations, making him listen to the awful Cohen version as compared to Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright, and E held onto the soul of the song fast.
His goal this week is to improvise, to make the song his own. He knows the chords and the melody, but now he’s experimenting with the pedal, rhythm, and breaking up the chords in pleasing ways (alas, the pedal only sometimes works on this piano). The kid who would fight about the idea of practicing for thirty minutes is suddenly spending thirty minutes and more at a time on this song alone.
It was recorded on my cell phone, but you get the idea.
Someone added me to their friends list on Facebook, which reminded me that I’m a member of Facebook, so I added all the people to my friends list that were in my Gmail account. Within five minutes I had ten replies.
Don’t you people have other things to do???? Feel free to not respond.
There’s something slightly poetic about my eight-year-old playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the piano in his underwear.
Recent Comments