Today I’m in south central Washington. I think the plan is to go taste some wines at some local places, go see some of the local colors downtown, then maybe chill a bit. Reverend Jane Newall at the Rainbow MCC has been very gracious — we had a wonderful discussion last night about so many things, and again it’s proving to me that the guitar continues to be a window of opportunity for learning. She also happens to be a fellow Yalie.
As for the outreach last night, I must be honest, it was a difficult experience. I didn’t mind the small turnout — neither of us realized when we booked the event that the third and final presidential debate would be happening at the same time. But I’ve played for small crowds before and can work in an intimate environment. The listeners seemed passive and spoke very little. I tried everything in my repertoire and used everything from my experience to try to promote interactive listening, but somehow there was no response to my energy. A few seemed familiar with the music, the guitar, and even Spanish music and composers, so it must have been something else. The ones that didn’t really speak said they liked the music, just that they weren’t “analytical”. But even then, I’ve gotten too-cool-for-school high schoolers to perk up and share a few words.
Last night did give me an opportunity to re-emphasize my belief that classical music wasn’t superior — just a different kind of music expressing familiar human thoughts, emotions, and events. That idea seemed to work. In any case, I’m in this outreach thing for the challenges, not the walks in the park. Whatever I was supposed to learn by coming to Yakima and playing for the group that I did, I can only hope that I’ll gradually figure out soon. Maybe the wine will help, maybe talking to the locals might shed some light too.
(Thanks so much to Eliot Fisk and my lovely friend Nadia for sharing their thoughts. )
Hey Steve,
Nice blog – I’m a guitarist, as well as a photographer, so enjoyed reading a few of your posts.
What I’m replying to you about though is your blog has been spammed/hacked. If you ‘View Source’ for your pages, you’ll find, at the bottom, a long, long list of links to viagra, cialis, etc .. It’s common thing in Wordpress blogs. You might want to check the WP forums if you need help cleaning it out. It requires removing a few files from your directories, DEFINITELY change your password, and upgrade to the newest version of WP. My blog got hacked the same way a month or so ago, I cleaned it up, etc, but didn’t upgrade, and it got hacked again – the same thing as what’s going on with yours. I upgraded and hopefully that’ll help protect it. You should find a number of threads on the WP forums about this kind of thing.
One of the things that alerted me to this, because you don’t see the links on your blog page just in the source code, is that google dropped my blog. If google rank is important to you, definitely clean it up, before they drop your site. It’s a hassle.
If you need any help, email me – I’m not a tech guy or anything, but having done it twice I can possibly help out if you have any trouble.
Here is a thread I posted on WP about it recently.
Google pills viadrene images and your site comes up on page 6.
Cheers
Carl