Tonight I went to play at a bar/restaurant called Pascucci, down on State Street. I played with my friends, Peter on guitar, Sterling on violin, Lorenzo on drums and your humble servant on Sarod. First of all I was supposed to be there at 6:30 so I left my house at 6:15.
Follow me downfold, if you've a mind to read a diary that doesn't anything to do with the present political situation, T. baggers, Sarah Palin, or even global warming. I know, I know; it's Earth Day, and one is supposed to be relevant; but what is more relevant than music, I ask you?
I went down there and just short of arriving at the place I was called and told that it wasn't happening because a table had been set up where we were supposed to play, so we weren't going to play that night, and was I okay with coming back a week later and playing. Needless to say I was upset, and I probably had that overtone in my voice when I grunted that I suppose I would play the next week, and that I was going home. I then turned around and went back to Montecito, and when I was almost all the way back I was called again and told that it was happening after all, so I went back down into town, and Linda was kind enough to park the car while I took the instruments in.
As usual the bar was noisy, and we had a very very small place to set up, which we did shortly after I got there, speakers, drums, cables, instruments, whole rats nests of stuff that we have to put out. Then finally we started playing, which was amusing in its own way since Sterling is absolutely manuke, a Japanese word that means "without space"; what it means is that he's pretty much always playing unless he's not on stage so it was a little frustrating that way and then of course Peter comes over and says to me "smile!" In that way that he has that makes it clear he doesn't understand that I was doing show business before he began his first incarnation, even, also.
I love how he stands there playing his guitar with this unutterably cheesy look on his face, a look so contrived that even the most inexperienced tourist from Iowa visiting Santa Barbara for the first time knows that he's putting it on. I turned to, or rather on, him and growled "don't tell me what to do". I was in no mood to hear no bullshit from no Peter nor nobody today, if you know what I mean; it was just one of those days that I was in ever so slight high dudgeon, which begs the question; can one be in medium dudgeon? How about low dudgeon? I had to apologize to Linda because I was so coriaceous; that's a loan word from Italian that means "crusty, tough, hard to bite into, leathery, lobster-shelled" and so forth.
At the first break I went and sat with Linda and explained to her that this kind of thing makes me sort of feel like a purple octopus from Mars, looking at these strange beings who are creating sound vibrations with these strange things in a strange place where other strange beings are intaking various forms of ethanol alcohol for various purposes, mostly strange. I had a double cranberry juice and I drank it much too fast. By the time I got back onstage my stomach was a little bit upset but not too, what in Itanglish we call "Upsetto ma non troppo", and I was reassured by the fact that I knew that it would pass pretty soon.
I couldn't hear the Sarod very well, partly because it's hell to amplify; this is an instrument that is made for feedback, what with 25 strings on a skin, so amplifying it in any way is difficult. Then there's the whole bar scene, a scene that I despise, a scene that I would like to treat as a dog treats a fire hydrant, a scene for which I have the utmost scorn, "Disprezzo" is a suitable Italian word for it. Oh, I know; "nothing human is foreign to me", as Terentius said, one of my favorite quotes; and I really should have had some of that alcohol, because as the saying goes; "malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."
And God really does have to justify what the heck I'm doing on this planet, and why I got exiled here; I couldn't have been that bad. Just because I got the high priest's daughters drunk on snarfjuice and had them dancing half naked, and might have even got one or two of them pregnant, is no reason to kick me off the planet, but here I am. On Earth, as the denizens of every planet always call it, in their own language of course. I mean even we called it Earth, back where I came from although of course we had reached a much more advanced state of civilization and therefore had gone beyond war. So here I am. In a bar. Playing the Sarod. All I can say is, God must have a pretty weird sense of humor.
Correction; God has a pretty weird sense of humor. I mean, seriously; organs of generation, pleasure, and elimination conjoined? Prostate gland around the urethra? Tea baggers? Popes?
Later on I insisted on playing Bhairavi; I was in no mood to take no guff, as you can tell from my using so many double negatives, so I just launched right into it and didn't let anybody step on my alap, but I did the whole thing, only being naughty at one moment when I drifted into Gujari Todi/Marwa, some particularly sawtoothed and poisonous stuff, but only a drop or two, and that's more than enough for gringos; try this on for size, white boy; we got ways to signify our peevishness. You don't invite an Ustad and think that he's going to play "Mary had a Little Lamb" which we conoscenti referred to as "Mhall". Not only what you see is what you get, but you even get something you don't necessarily see, ha ha. I suppose I could write LOL, but I prefer to say "I laugh".
Am I too crusty for you? Am I too rough, too tough, too hard to swallow? Well, what are you going to do? I mean, I am what I am and that's what I am, as Popeye used to say. And as I say now.
Thank God there is Sunday morning to follow such a Saturday night, and being able to laugh with a person who is one's equal, or dare I say perhaps even one's superior intellectually. And thank God for poppyseed rolls from Xanadu bakery, which are the perfect self-indulgence on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night such as that. And let me state unequivocally that they're all really good guys, Peter, Sterling, Lorenzo, and how could they not be? After all, they are musicians, and that puts them a notch above practically anything else that walks the surface of the earth, and that includes gods, demons, gurus, prophets, popes, presidents, and various other so-called authority figures. Here's mud in your eye!