I dunno.  I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say yet, but I’ll give it a whirl.

There’s a really interesting conversation going on right now, initially spearheaded by Pandolfi, but now spilling out into the wider stream.  The whole “what is bluegrass” conversation, and it’s almost certain that it’s always been going on but just never showed up on my radar.

I’ve been, in the most nominal sense, a bluegrass musician for close to 10 years now.  Jeremy from the Dusters asked me the other night how long I’d been playing bluegrass.  I wasn’t sure what answer to give him.  Less than a year?  Almost 10 years?

Then yesterday I read that Devol interview and the part where he says that the Avetts brothers are “in NO way a bluegrass band” struck a chord.  Pardon the pun.  

Now here’s a bass player that I love like a brother, in one of those bluegrass bands that gets routinely and deliberately ignored by the IBMA, the supposed torch-bearing organization of bluegrass music, succumbing to the same trap of bluegrass judgmentalism that drives musicians like us crazy.  I, for one, happen to think the Avetts ARE bluegrass, whether they care to be considered that or not.

I think RRE and Cornmeal are bluegrass, even if they are loud as fuck and have drum kits and electric guitars.  I think Avetts and Mumford are bluegrass, even if they’re poppy and successful.  I think the Stringdusters are bluegrass even if they sound increasingly like a really good jamband.  I love bluegrass music, but honestly, the shit I can’t listen to for much longer than an hour or so is that SPBGMA (pronounced Spig-ma) style that is arguably the “most” bluegrass of all these subgenres.  I surely wouldn’t stoop to calling any of it “not bluegrass”.  It just seems hypocritical. 

Is there a “problem” with bluegrass?  By every available metric bluegrass and all it’s dialects is doing better than ever.  Is the problem just that it’s gone beyond it’s traditional borders and has a lot more people involved in the conversation and the scene than ever before?  

Is that really a problem?  

I could see how it would be if you were the organization that used to be the authoritative voice on the subject for the community that used to be easy to contain within defined borders.  I don’t know.  The Church analogy still seems fitting.  The gated community one, also.

I recently joined the IBMA to see if there’s any interest of this conversation within that community, rather than being one of these folks sniping from the outside.  I guess we’ll see.

The coolest house that Michelle and I looked at was a 1950’s brick farmhouse. Actually, it didn’t strike me as particularly farmhousey, but that’s how she keeps referring to it, so it must be soaking in. Basically it was just a nice two story house that had been recently redone. I mean, completely redone. Brand new everything - maple countertops, new appliances, updated bathrooms, new furnace (heatpump, actually) and hot water heater. Raised beds that were full of tomatoes and peppers outside - raised beds that weren’t surrounded by razor wire to keep the effing deer away. 2 car detached garage with a nice big room above it that would make a perfect office or guest suite someday.

This whole joint was sitting on 7 acres about 20 minutes outside of Asheville. That’s about as far as we have to drive to get to Newton, the nearest town with a remotely decent grocery store. The bottom half of the property was a pasture with a creek running through it. The top half was where the house sat. It’s a “grown up house”, the likes of which Michelle and I have been fantasizing about since we bought this yet-to-be-fixed-up fixer-upper here in Stillwater. We’d probably have money to put into the house if we didn’t have to pay $6000 a year in property taxes, which comes out to about half of our mortgage every month.

Property taxes on this 7 acre, brand new everything house? $1300 a year. That’s $4700 a year that could go to our kids college fund instead of salt for the road or who-knows-what at Stillwater Elementary. $4700 a year would basically cover our entire grocery bill. We could maybe even have “savings”. Wow.

So to say that we have escalated the get-the-eff-out-of-Jersey effort is one way of putting it. I honestly don’t know why anyone would live here. I can understand if your job makes you live here, but I can’t fathom why my former bandmates would live here except that they’ve never lived anywhere else. They must be pissing away half of their paycheck on taxes alone (like I am).

On balance, we’re pretty excited. Next stop - Ann Arbor.

It’s been a while, eh? The time has come for me and my family to join the throng of people leaving New Jersey. I can’t think of a better reason to move somewhere than to be closer to family, but New Jersey gives us the added incentive of being the most insanely expensive place to live in the entire country. And now that I don’t have a gig that requires me to live there, though I’m seriously questioning why I ever thought I needed to live there in the first place, Michelle and I are looking around.

We’ve spent the week in Asheville, which has plenty of plusses. We’ll be visiting Ann Arbor soon as well, which also has plenty of plusses. Lowering the overhead is the order of the day and both areas have plenty of good schools and nice houses for sale. Asheville has plenty of musical work for me, and Ann Arbor seemingly has plenty of development work going on. I know a decent number of musicians in Michigan as well, but I also know a decent number of developers in Asheville. It’s kind of a toss up at this point. Plenty of vegetarian food and yoga in both locations. Not a fan of MI winter, and am a fan of the Blue Ridge Parkway, so at this point I’m slightly leaning toward Asheville. But we haven’t been to Ann Arbor yet…

I feel guilty for leaving my blogs for dead, and wanted to say hello to whomever is listening. Thanks.

J

I was thinking yesterday for some reason.

I was thinking about how much more inspired I felt to write to nobody/everybody this time last year. I was remembering how it felt effortless to expound upon the music business and software as if I had anything of worth to say. Interestingly, I think I did. Interestingly, now that I ostensibly know a lot more what I’m talking about I feel a lot more reluctant to blather about it. Less confident. Why is that?

I think it has a lot to do with not making my living on a stage anymore. Getting up in front of people and doing a confident, creative thing for a living has a lot of side effects that are good and bad. Playing music was a fairly easy skill for me to pick up, and gave me much needed confidence in my teens that I might actually be a talented individual. It helped me to cast off some of the negative side effects of non-jockdom in high school. It gave me a very clear and immediate feedback mechanism as to whether or not I was doing a good job. This feedback is kind of like fertilizer for the ego. Fertilizer can obviously help plants grow stronger than they ordinarily would, but if you don’t use care in the feeding it can take over the whole side of your yard, just as letting the ego grow unchecked can lead to a lot more serious problems (and seemingly uncontrollable side effects).

I think this experience thus far has been a little lot like taking the pruning shears to my ego. It kinda sucks because I feel a little lot less productive and open right now, but I think that it’s going to be a good thing for my long term spiritual health. Besides, I’m actually doing a hell of a lot more than I ever have before. I just doesn’t feel that way because there’s no crowd cheering when I do something halfway right. Strange, mostly because I disagreed with my shrink when he said something like this to me a few months ago. I didn’t consider myself the attention craving type, which has turned out to be not-the-case.

When you prune back that bush, it looks a little ugly at first.

I was just listening to NJN on the radio. They play the 6 o’clock news on the radio at 7:30 and the lead off story was about a compromise that Governor Chris Christie had offered to the democrats in the state legislature. The issue was over property taxes (which are outrageous in NJ, of course) and Christie’s insistence since he took office on a cap on the percentage that they are allowed to be raised every year. Specifically, he wanted a state constitutional amendment to cap property tax hikes.

So, he backed off making it a constitutional amendment so that it might actually get passed. “Good for him”, I thought. “Is that sanity in politics down there in Trenton? I mean, a compromise so that something, anything might actually happen doesn’t sound like something that happens very often in government. Maybe I should pay more attention to state politics. Oh well if he’s a Republican.”

So then the commentary comes on, and all they talk about for a good 3 minutes straight is who can consider what a “win”. “Well, Christie can call this a win because blah blah blah, but the Democrats can still call this a win because blah blah blah.”

I wonder - is part of the reason that politics are so depressing these days because politicians actually believe that their constituents think about the issues in the same terms that the media couches them for our consumption. Do you give a flying shit about the political affiliation of anyone who “wins” a political battle any more? I obviously don’t.

And furthermore, as long as politicians focus only on “winning” all the rest of us lose, regardless.

Corporations and organizations brainwashed generations of people to believe that they had no option. Go to school, go to the placement office, get a job, do what you’re told. The amazing reality of our time is this is no longer true. And yet. And yet few people are developing their alternative, building an external reputation and yes, even moonlighting on the weekends. When you have the option, not only does your confidence change, your work does as well.

-via Seth.

Concentration can be of great value, but it can also be seriously limiting if you become seduced by the pleasant quality of this inner experience and come to see it as a refuge from life in an unsatisfactory world. You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peace. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.