Tag: piano

the grind

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I am preparing to move house in a few weeks, so I have been going through and downsizing some of my things. I am very selective about the items that I choose to attach to. At least that’s what I tell myself; for the past three years I have moved at the end of the summer, and at each move I find more things to let go of. This move, one of the big changes is that I am ruthlessly culling my sheet music library. For the past 15 years, I have basically said yes to everything, and I built up a full 2X4 IKEA Kallax full of music. This has meant a lot of wandering down memory lane and revisiting all of the piano music that brought me to the present.

I am always surprised to find the pieces of music that are 80% finished. There’s a Haydn sonata that I worked on in college but I could never get the fast movement going fast enough. The last piece I worked on with my hometown piano teacher was a Clementi sonatina, and it too has piano markings that stop on the second to last page. I was so close. I was also drowning in shame, I hated the scale and arpeggio practice needed to smooth out my performance, and I didn’t know how to use a metronome.

There’s an article I like by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (I think he writes about computer programming) about how incredibly tedious work can appear like a magic trick:

I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it was never clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triaged effectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the open ticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I was tasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trend in the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down to zero.

So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. […] I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.

The trend reversed immediately after that: we were able to close several hundred tickets immediately as duplicates, and triaging new issues now took minutes instead of a day. It took I think a year or more to drive the count to zero, but it was all fairly smooth sailing. People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.

I have a very quick intelligence, but it has some limitations. When problem solving, if I find the right answer, I will find it first. If I don’t see the answer quickly, I will never see it myself. The patient work, the “grind,” is very hard for me. If I can see the next 10 steps to a fix, I get the dopamine reward. Completing those 10 steps does nothing for me.

In piano, like so many other things, doing the small patient work is the whole game. I love improvising music the most. I can sit down at a piano and play for hours before running out of juice. Yet for every one hour that I spend working through a piece of written music that is pushing the edges of my skill range, I get better and sharper in a way that I couldn’t when improvising. Practicing improvisation makes me quicker and calmer while performing, but it doesn’t make me better.

I’m still learning to love it, though.

Awake

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Yesterday I was a little bit late getting started in the morning, but I kind of shook off some of my unhappiness fog and made some progress shuffling around stuff to make my use of space a little better.

When kids started arriving, I went to watch the teen room, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. We have two middle school girls coming right now, sisters, that are totally weird (which is not derogatory, that’s a huge positive for me) and super into anime and manga and colored hair and weird accessories. The younger one was worked up nearly to the point of tears because All The Shit Had Gone Down in whatever manga series she is reading. Both of them gushed about whatever boy was in it and looked vaguely like this

img-thingand I had some fun making fun of his Tragic Backstory and Soulful Eyes and Husky Voice and the fact that You’re The Only One That Ever Got To Know Him. I told them that anime was building up unrealistic expectations of boys in them, and that they still had to endure like six years of boys trying to express their affection by being jerks and farting.

The rest of the day was not hard, but pretty chaotic. We were down a couple of people.

After work, I stopped by the grocery store because I just couldn’t do prepared food. A couple of weeks ago I redid my budget, and realized exactly how much money I could keep in my pocket if I didn’t spend of prepared food and drink, so I’m trying to be better about it. While making dinner, I made myself a drink, and I guess the alcohol made it before the food did, because I ended up a little buzzed. I ended up playing the piano for a while, just improvising where my heart led me, with wild abandon and many smushy notes. By about 9:30, I felt exhausted and decided to just go to sleep. I started to watch The Interview, which was not so good, but there was some banter involving James Franco and his stinky dick that was so dumb and gross that it woke me back up for a few minutes.

I woke up again at about 1am. When this happens, I give myself about 20 minutes to fall back asleep, otherwise I have to get up and do something productive or I’ll end up watching TV and jerking off all night. I wasn’t going to fall asleep, so I got up, did some dishes, cleaned out the fridge, and decided to do a 3am Winco run. I’ve never had such a relaxing grocery shopping trip in my life. It was nearly empty, I could take my time and wander every aisle, stop and contemplate weird food items, listen to my podcasts, and not be in any kind of hurry or rush or hanger.

It did make me a little more tired this morning than I would like, but I’m sure some coffee will pick me up if I need it.

Lasagne

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I was planning on spending my morning helping my friend A move furniture, but she cancelled on me, which was so much the better because I turned out to have a hangover after Friday night.


I got breakfast with RS at a family diner—because most of my social set is 20somethings with extremely narrow backgrounds and interests, being in a dining room with a mixture of young people, families with kids, all the way up to elderly couples getting weekend breakfast, can seem like a human kaleidoscope of overstimulation. It was nice to catch up with him, I’m behind on bills right now and it makes me feel weird to talk to him when that’s the elephant in the room. 

I honestly cannot remember what I did yesterday afternoon, which is a terrible sign of something.

I’ve been thinking more about starting an Artist’s Way group, and I decided that I wanted to have a real copy of the book, instead of the shitty pirated ebook that I’ve been reading. I went over to the Hawthorne Powell’s to buy it and use up the gift card I got from exchanging books the last time I went. It’s incredible how shame works. As I was poking around Self Help—General looking for my book, I was flashing back to trips to Barnes and Noble when I was a teenager, trying to quickly browse the Gay and Lesbian shelf (shelf!). It was in the section near the history and biography sections, a plausible interest of mine, and I figured I had about 90 seconds at a time to browse. Anyway, I couldn’t find a copy right away and I new they had them in stock, but I ended up having to ask somebody that works there to help me. I felt as nervous asking him as 18 year old me would have been to ask for The Joy of Gay Sex or something. I also picked up a copy of Vanity Fair which turns out to be a much longer novel than I thought. 

After getting back from Powells, I made some plans to have dinner with my friend RC. I was happy to have a few minutes to catch up with L, but her boyfriend was over. I was briefly overcome with such an angry irritation at his presence, so I decided to give them both a wide berth because it wasn’t really their fault and I was being petulant. 

RC’s many virtues is that she has a true lack of judgement and true unconditional acceptance, so I felt like I could share some of the new headspace I’ve been in since Wednesday. I felt comfortable enough to share some of the stuff that’s in my artistic journal, which is starting to take shape and form and growing into a real work of art. We got into a long and emotional conversation about the way that we mediate ourselves in order to conform to expectations when other people have power over our lives. It was a good talk, a real talk. 

After dinner, I was really full and a little bit sleepy. I decided that all I wanted to do was really listen to music. I listened to Sun Structures by Temples. It’s neo-psychedelic rock, kind of sipping the same juice as Tame Impala, with the gauzy veils of reverb of Fleet Foxes. I liked it fine, I love it when bands have that almost neo-classical impulse to make interesting music and not just try and distinguish themselves with production gimmicks. At the same time, it’s such a retro project that it can be hard to figure out what a good or bad song would be in context. 

After that, I listened to The Voyager by Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. I enjoyed these songs a lot, to the point of not wanting to be too critical or pick them apart. The songs are really personal, and I don’t feel like I have too many experiences in common yet, but I can appreciate their artistry. I’m a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac, and I felt like I heard a lot of them in this.

Once I caught my second wind, I went on a tear, just playing piano with the kind of reckless abandon and joy at hearing my own sounds that used to keep me occupied for hours as a child. At some point, I became so focused on making sure that my practice times were productive and focused that I lost that spirit. I became a lot more focused on making sure I sounded good and wasn’t repeating myself into cliché. I don’t think that’s all wrong—I certainly want to get better and make sure that the time I am putting in is useful time!—but I think I’m coming to understand that the time when I can just sit back and enjoy the sounds I’m making are the embers that keep my fire alive. All of the time I spend trying to stoke myself up without giving those embers oxygen is a waste of time and effort.

I decided to go out and hear JP deejay at a bar at midnight. He’s been letting me into movies free at the theater he works at. It turned out to be kind of a bummer, and I left as soon as I finished my drinks.

As I fell asleep, I watched an excellent Taiwanese gay movie called Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. It’s kind of a cross between Punch Drunk Love and Far From Heaven, a deliberately stylized and retro, with a little bit of a old Hollywood movie musical/Technicolor aesthetic. It’s a very controlled movie, never breaks into laugh out loud funny or anything, but some good performances, and a lot better than the average shitty gay movie I fall asleep to on a Saturday night. 

 

edgefield

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
On a tuesday, I woke up early enough to have a proper breakfast. L was home from work, so I got a chance to apologize for being snippy with her a couple evenings ago.
When I got to work, I had the presence of mind to remember that I didn’t have that much time to finish some lesson plans for the batch of programs I’ll be starting next week, so I wanted to buckle down and work on them. I pulled something out from my student days, the Pomodoro technique. In a nutshell, this is about breaking tasks down into 25 minute chunks, and then staying focused on working for 25 minutes (called a pomodoro) and then taking a five minute break. After two, then four pomodoros, you take longer breaks. Very simple, but usually I can stay focused for 25 minutes without straying off topic, and I like the fact that it builds in the human need for breaks. One of the stranger things about it is that sometimes I have a hard time deciding what to do in that deliberate five minutes of break time. It makes me realize how much of the smartphone time and internet browsing I do is complete bullshit, because when I have the choice of how to deliberately relax, they don’t appeal to me.
At some point in the day, I read this post by Seth Godin about uncertainty. It’s short, so I’m just going to copy the whole thing:

Often, the most important work we do doesn’t bring a guaranteed, specific result. Usually, the result of any given action on our part is unknown.

Uncertainty implies a range of possible outcomes.

But a range of results, all uncertain, does not mean you are exposing yourself to risk. It merely means you’re exposing yourself to an outcome you didn’t have a chance to fall in love with in advance.

A simple example: the typical high school student applying to a range of colleges has very little risk of getting in nowhere. Apply to enough schools that match what you have to offer, and the odds are high indeed you’ll get in somewhere. Low risk but a very high uncertainty about whichcollege or colleges will say yes.

That’s not risky. That’s uncertain. It takes fortitude to live with a future that’s not clearly imagined, but it’s no reason not to apply.

Another example: If you speak to 100 people, it’s uncertain which 40 people will be impacted by what you say. But the risk that you will resonate with no one is small indeed.

The question to ask every organization, manager, artist or yourself is, “are you hesitating because you’re not sure the future will match your specific vision, or is there truly a project-endangering risk here?”

A portfolio of uncertain outcomes is very different from a large risk.

I haven’t completely processed that all yet, but it’s blowing my mind that it’s possible to divorce the emotional risk aversion of uncertainty of outcome from risk of harm. I feel like some things that I’m trying to get better at right now (meeting people and getting a new job, for example) are classic examples of things that have little risk of harm, but a lot of uncertainty of outcome. The more I focus on lack of risk, the more comfortable I will get. The more I seek certainty, the more likely that I’ll trip myself up and get discouraged.

It made me realize how much I wanted a new job and have more people in my life that I could play music with. I need to get going a little bit more with that, develop a little more hustle.
The only thing that happened of note at work is that I got my ass kicked in chess by a 10 year old.
I went with roommate K and friend M to taco tuesday ($1.50 for 4 tacos) at a sketchy ass western bar in Gresham called the Stagecoach Saloon. I had a good time. Afterward, we went for a couple of drinks at Edgefield. I’d never been before, but I love McMenamin’s restorations. There was a super cool urinal (I’m a fan of cool urinals) with working pressure gages above it that I wish I had taken a picture of. We played some darts and shuffleboard.
2015-01-13 21.17.23 Processed with VSCOcam with b6 preset
After that, we headed to another bar on the property, a cozy place with a woodfire stove. We got too hot and went outside to sit by the fire pit. It was lovely.
Practiced a little piano when I got home. I’m trying to practice every day, although I’m finding it hard to push through with no goals. Went to sleep quickly and with cinematic dreams because the internet wasn’t working, so there was nothing to do while falling asleep then to simply fall asleep.

I almost impulse bought a piano

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

 

 

I don’t have any money. I don’t have any room for it. I have easy access to pianos elsewhere. But I almost bought a piano a couple of days ago.

Classic Pianos, on Milwaukie and Powell here in Portland, has been having a basement sale to clear out inventory. As I was riding a bus into Downtown, that sign above, $99 piano, caught my eye. I don’t care what the piano sounds like, or how it’s been taken care of. If it plays and is capable of holding tune, 99 dollars is a ludicrously low price for a piano. I had an appointment with my therapist, but the whole time I was in session, a small part of my brain was arguing: “Dude, you have no money.” “Yeah, but, come on, I have $99. And you’re never going to see that price again.” “But you’re starting school next week, you’re going to need money.” “But it’s a piano.”

By the time the appointment was over, common sense had returned. It’s a hundred dollars, but that’s not the only cost associated with owning a piano. Plus, there was no was I was going to get my roommates to go for it. I decided that there was no way that it was going to happen, and I should head home after the appointment.

When my bus stopped at Milwaukie and Powell, there was a person in a wheelchair getting off, so we were stopped a little longer than usual. And in that brief extra time, my heart really wanted to touch the piano on the street, and my brain gave its OK. There was an upright, the one in the picture, as well as a charming spinet. The spinet was more in tune, as well as having a clearer tone, but as soon as I went over to check to make sure all the keys were working, a salesman came outside and invited me to check out the showroom and the basement pianos.

I walked into the store, and was immediately assaulted by the memories of wild pianos I have known. There was a black Bösendorfer, the same size as the one in the Reed College practice rooms. A gaudy white Yamaha baby grand that my 11 year old self would have drooled over. A classic shiny black upright, the piano that I always imagined I would have in my sophisticated apartment, or cloistered away in my home studio. A blonde parlor grand, like that owned by my music teacher. When I went downstairs to the basement, I was even able to find a couple of Baldwin Acrosonic spinets, like the one in my childhood home, though none of them was exactly the same model. Good thing, too. I might have lost it.

I was overtaken with some mixture of happiness, sadness, and a kind of deep excitement. Part of it was the nostalgia of recognizing the different pianos that I’ve formed an attachement to. Part of it was the simple regret that I don’t have a spare $3,000 or $5,000 to throw around right now to do it right. But the best part was a little of the childlike enthusiasm that used to be inseparable from the experience of playing and listening to music for me.

Once I had decided that I really wasn’t in a place to buy a piano, I just spent some time playing. I sat down at a beautiful Yamaha grand, and launched into my memorized five or six minutes of the Schubert Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D.960. I haven’t made the progress with it that I’ve wanted, but for that amount of time, I can fake some level of virtuosity. There was a feeling of security and confidence that came to me, that this world is not a mystery, that these are things that I know, that this arrangement of black and white levers is neither foreign nor mysterious nor intimidating. These are my tools.

That was such a rush. That feeling of play and excitement often feels like something I misplaced. And retracing my steps these last couple of years can feel like being an amnesiac recovering lost memory. It’s frustrating, because at this point in my life, time feels like this ever accelerating force, like the frontiers of an expanding universe, but unless I have that sense of play, I will always be fighting myself musically. It was good to sit down in that room and play. It reassured me that, you know what, I’ve been doing this a while. I’m not the best, but I know some things. And I can do even better, even greater, if I get out of my own way.