Tuesday evening I did something unusual - I was the opening act for my son.

Sort of.

Since my son has been in town to attend a series of weddings, my wife got the idea that we should all go to Muggswigz for Open Mike night. Natrually, this would entail his playing some songs off of his album and me playing some of my songs. Neither of us felt we were ready, but we had a few days to do some fever pitched rehearsing. Then I packed up my guitar and the keyboard I bought to do use in home recording (cheaper than a bass guitar and drum machine, and more versatile with all those voices inside it) and the three of us set off.

On the way we joked about who was going to open for whom. I also kept encouraging my son to plug his album, threatening to do it for him if he didn't.

So we arrived at Muggs and dragged all the stuff in (guitar in case, keyboard and it's attendant plugs and pedals, plus the stand) and settled in. I called Henry J to see if he wanted to come and play, too - in a conversation we'd had earlier, he'd complained that he hadn't played out lately). He showed up without a guitar, just there to lend moral support for my son and I.

We got signed up. By the time we got to the sheet, the first four slots were open and five through nine had been taken. My son signed up for slot four, I took three, and an opening act was born. Then we waited.

My wife, bless her heart, showed great restraint. She loves to see us do this sort of thing and wants us both to do well at these things, and her tendency is to want to coach and offer advice beforehand. But son and I were so nervous that she didn't. The only thing she did was, during the first open mike performer of the evening, she reminded me to take slow, deep breaths to relax. I did. It helped.

Since the last time I played out and wasn't sure if I liked doing it, I've been playing in front of people more. I've done a couple of sound checks during shoots of Random Acts of Music tapings, and Henry J and I have jammed some - and during those times I realized that I was becoming less and less self-conscious and paralyzingly nervous before playing. All that and my fevered rehearsals paid off. When my time came and I got up to play, I didn't have that paralyzing "hands of Jell-O" feeling that I'd been prone to earlier.

I also was playing more with my stage persona. I made a point to talk more between songs and tried to make the kind of witty comments that I throw in during conversations with friends. I should also add that I had earlier taken Henry J's advice and rehearsed with a microphone so I could get used to singing into it.

All of this stuff paid off. This was a corner-turning performance for me. Going in I was convinced that playing out was not something I wanted to do. Now I think it's something I can do. So new piece of advice from me: the rule is, if you're going to play out, do it at least three times before you decide whether you're going to keep it up or not.

I won't bore you with the details (I've decided it's not my place to review myself), but this was my set-list:

Wish I Were
One More Cigarette
Going to Texas #4

Finishing that, it was my son's turn to play. We got the keyboard set up, and he was off. He was nervous at the idea of doing patter between songs, so he limited his comments to making a joke about being from the Twin Cities and the accent we all associate with that area. And yes, he plugged his album, too. He played three songs from Start:

Jazz & Vicodin
Wanda
This College Life

I don't know if I'm qualified to review my son's performance, either, but he did really well. This was a corner-turning performance for him, too. He said he didn't like playing live, but I was passing on wisdom from Henry J about the importance of playing songs before an audience, and I think that helped convince him to try (plus the extra nudging from his mother!). After he played, he said he enjoyed it, and I think that like me, the terror in the idea of performing was gone (there's still stagefright, but that's another thing). And bless his heart, Henry J was only too happy to offer critique and answer my son's questions about all aspects of the music biz - I think that helped.

A couple of notes about his performance. When he started, he really got people's attention. I don't know if it was because he was the only keyboard player that night, or if it was because of his unique style of songwriting. People who were out of line of sight stopped what they were doing and walked around a corner to see what he was up to. And during the rollicking Wanda the audience started to clap along - and it wasn't started by me or my wife. That wasn't something we would have thought of doing, and if we had, I'm sure he could have disapproved. But one guy waiting for his latte at the bar started in and poof! - everyone joined it. It was a really cool moment for him, I'm sure.

During the postmortem on the drive home, we realized we should have played something together. A while back ago, before his move to the Twin Cities, I gave him a primitive recording of Going to Texas #4 with the idea of him doing backup vocals on it. For that matter, I could have sung the extra parts on Jazz & Vicodin or Wanda. We also talked about dragging my wife into things - she sang on his recording of Ti Dot Matre, and she and I have been working on a cover of Carpet of the Sun by Renaissance.

Or for that matter, we could collaborate on some kind of song. But that's a project best left to the next time he comes home.

Meantime, I'm thinking about a new set of songs to play at Muggs in the near future...

There are so many things going on that warranted updates that I simply didn't write about - as opposed to the salad days of this blog when each one would have warranted its own separate and lengthy essay.

Anyway, here's what's been happening in the land of the Faust.


Charlton Heston, R.I.P

I'm supposing that my brother and I will both miss having Chuck around, albeit for two different reasons. My brother, being 13 years older, grew up on Mr. Heston in his epic roles - The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, El Cid, Will Penny, Major Dundee. The parts well served by his larger than life leading-man presence.

Being born later, I remember a different Charlton Heston - the rugged, heroic everyman forced into impossible circumstances. I'm talking of course about the great Charlton Heston Sci-Fi Trilogy of the Early 70's - Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man.

Now I know you'd be hard-pressed to call any of them Sci-Fi, or even Early 70's since one came out in '68 or '69 - but for a kid struggling to survive the horrors of Junior High and early High School, this was pretty heady stuff. Remember that the endings to Apes and Soylent were brand new back then, instead of being the target of parody that all twist endings fall victim to ("I see dead people!"). When stuff like that happens, it's hard to remember the magic impact that the original had when first seen in the flickering light of a theater.

Rather than wax eloquent on Heston and his roles and the importance they had to me at the time, I'll instead say this. I recently had a chance to revisit Soylent Green and I thought it held up remarkably well. It was a well crafted thriller for its time and deserves a look past what is considered to be an overwrought ending.

In the meantime, I'm going to take another look at The Omega Man soon, inspired by seeing I Am Legend with my son over the Christmas holiday. I was surprised at how much the Will Smith remake owed to what I remember of the Heston version - so it'll be an interesting look, especially if my son is around to see it.


Well what do you know...

I'd grown up hearing the expression flea circus. I always assumed the expression originated from an attraction that was basically an illusion, a miniature circus that was run by hidden magnets and gears to give the illusion that it was being run by real fleas.

Well, insipired by today's installment of Lio, I checked out "flea circus" in Wikipedia and guess what?

Apparently, at one time, real fleas were used in flea circuses. They were even trained and everything. Seriously.


Now I Know How Scientologists Feel When Tom Cruise Starts to Open His Mouth in Public...

Why, oh why, oh why do other believers do this sort of thing? Don't they realize that Jesus has his hands full trying to save our wretched souls and doesn't have time to appear in municipal court?

Pastor sees noise citation as precedent-setting, says Jesus Christ is his attorney.

And... well, that's it. There were a couple more, but I've spun them off into their own stories. One you've already seen, about my crashing attending a Global Warming Symposium. The other will be up in a day or so, likely.

I'm not going to go into detail lest I endanger the job of the concierge who let me slip in the door (or, rather, fell for the line I fed him), but I really did. I slipped through the doors of the conference center and hung out for a day with a host of brilliant minds as they tackled what they see as the sticky problem of global warming.¹

I learned a number of interesting and important things:

1. Nothing makes you feel stupid faster than hanging around a bunch of brilliant people.
   
   
2. Nothing makes you realize how much in life you haven't accomplished by hanging around a bunch of hyperdriven Type A personalities.
   
   
3. A high IQ does not always mean a well-designed PowerPoint presentation.
   
   
4. Or for that matter, a scintillating manner of public speaking. Or even something above a soporific monotone.
   
   
5. Persons who have inadequate English As A Second Langauge skills become riveting speakers in the light of items 3 and 4. And most importantly,
   
   
6. Hang out with brilliant people long enough and you begin to question their brilliance - if not their sanity.

The reason I am questioning their sanity right now is because I learned what their solution to the problem is. They are going to take the infamous greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the air, mostly at the source of production (such as a refinery or coal fired power plant), inject it into naturally occurring saline water, and then...

Are you sitting down?

They shoot this fizzy slush down into the ground where it can't escape.² Then it will turn into harmless minerals like the stuff we put on our roads in the winter... over geological time.³

I took a couple of things away from this symposium after learning that news.

First, does this strike anyone as sounding ridiculous? Or am I the only one? The most brilliant minds in the world got together and decide to save the world by taking the scary stuff and burying it in a hole in the ground.

Hmmm. Sound familiar? No, I'm not talking about that time in third grade when you buried those Math tests you got an "F" on and then the family dog dug them up and you spent the entire summer washing your dad's car. I'm talking about how CO2 now has the same status as nuclear waste. The ironic thing is that nuclear power is now starting to look pretty good by comparison to the eyes of these brilliant minds.

Now for irony squared: while burying nuclear waste (which also is rendered safe over geological time) is an unacceptable solution to many, they have no problem with burying CO2.

Second, why the big panic about all this Carbon stuff anyway? This stuff is called fossil fuel, right? Meaning it came from fossils, which were once living things. Living things made of carbon. Where did they get the carbon from? According to the laws of conservation of matter and energy, it just didn't show up in their bodies. It had to have come from somewhere.

Yeah, that's right. The carbon we're worried about putting into the air was already there at one time in the past.

Third. Since all of this carbon is there, isn't it kind of dumb to put it back in the ground for millions of years? Shouldn't we figure out how to recycle it back into more fossil fuels and get the price of gas back down to $0.26 a gallon?

Fourth. I'm sure the people of the year 1,000,048 will be really, really grateful for all of the calcium carbonate we will have left them. I think their comments will translate into something that sounds like this: "What were they thinking?"

Finally, isn't it the epitome of arrogance to think that we can save the world by taxing ourselves into oblivion to suck out insubstantial amounts of a gas that is produced by nature in mind-boggling amounts? And that nature has done a great job taking care of in equally mind-boggling proportions?

Okay, let me wipe the foam off of my lips. It's time to do a little speculation. See, this symposium also stoked some coal into the furnace of my writer's imagination,⁴ and I began to foresee future events if all of this stick-it-in-a-hole-in-the-ground nonsense comes to pass:

1. A future megadisaster brought about by seismic and/or volcanic activity which in turn triggers a climatological catastrophe - called by survivors "The Great Cosmic Burp."
   
   
2. A really heavy tax on soda pop and beer.
   
   
3. Alka Selter? Illegal.
   
   
4. A 40% increase in our utility bills. No, wait. That's the reality of this program.
   
   
5. A Brazil-like world where our automobiles carry huge tanks on their roofs that are collectors for Carbon Dioxide, which have to be taken to special garages to be bled off so the stuff can be buried. Whatever you do, please don't tell Al Gore about this one.
   
   
6. And speaking of, I also foresee a time when people have rebelled against all of this nonsense. The lasting legacy of this time of ecological madness we're spinning into will be what future psychologists will call "Al Gore's Syndrome" - wherin someone becomes so embittered by a catastrophic loss (let's say, oh... the loss of a presidential election) that the sufferer goes to Machiavellian lengths to prove their continued relevance.
   
   
7. Once everyone is taxed into poverty to do this, they decide to tackle the natural production of Carbon Dioxide. They put huge domes over volcanoes and Yellowstone Park, with giant tubes leading up into the sky where the evil stuff bleeds out into space. But wait, Carbon Dio is heavier than air, so we'll need giant fans to draw it all out before these places turn into Venus. So before long everybody's tax rate is 110%. When everybody runs out of money, then someone gets the bright idea to file a class action lawsuit against God.
   
   
8. With the Earth finally restored to pristine greenness, cluttered only by the mud huts we now live in because we can't afford anything else, we now turn our eyes to hunting down all of those automobiles and factories on Mars. A massive armada of (wind powered) space craft are built so we can go explore and save Mars! After all, it's warming up at the same rate that we are, and, well... it sure ain't doing it by itself. There must be some form of intelligent life there that is destroying the planet.

Scary stuff? If it is, keep in mind, it's only fiction.

For now.

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1. It's only sticky if you believe that we're causing the problem. I for one don't buy for a minute that we are.
   
2. By the way, potentially toxic gasses do not "escape." They "migrate." The brightest minds in the world taught me that, too.
   
3. Translation: bazillions of years.
   
4. How's that for a green metaphor?