Centre For Creative Aspiration, Atlanta.
Currently set up in the dining room, where a table provides a more suitable height for computing. A day of the house getting gently into readiness for the beginning, tomorrow evening, of the L3 course.
My own day has been mainly catching up with outstanding e-mail. A member of the course, who arrived at lunchtime, has been helping me with aspects of reloading the new hard-drive. My several problems with AOL have been ascribed to glitches in the AOL system, rather than cluelessness & witlessness on my part.
Arising e-matters:
I have been offered, and sadly declined, an invitation to perform Soundscapes in Norwich Cathedral. This is where Soundscapes were created to be played. Yet I have, reluctantly, to accept a lesson of Eurotour 2003: I am no longer able to absorb the impacts of daily, ongoing violation & negativity in live performance. The focus of my professional life has, nearly always, been live performance. This is the sacred space & time where recordings "make sense", where the moment is up for grabs, where audience & performers recognise they are the same person, where heaven reaches to earth and holds it in close embrace. And where heaven is shot down & nailed to earth by Mr. Clueless Of Budapest, and his family of kinship & affinity, who have consumer rights to get what they expect because they have handed over their hard-earned pay and deserve acknowledgement from the stage because they are in front of it. If all my energies & full attention were placed on defending myself while onstage, the personal damage would be minimised. But if I have to put that much energy into protecting myself, what's the point? My interest is increasingly in the subtleties within performance, not putting on armour to deflect swords & hammer blows from la famille Clueless.
Hernan has a seeing, for a Level Four GC course beginning in Kiel during March 2004. This has my support.
From an e-mail to Victor & Curt & Hernan --
the step-after-the-next-step for me is 2006-7 and, if this might honour the original vision for it, would be best sited in england. that may be impossible. on the other hand...
it seems clear that the centre of gravity of GC is presently in the hands of the first generation of Crafties, primarily those that spent time at the RLH. if Robert took no further part in GC, then Guitar Craft would continue to grow in an organic way. for the short & mid-term futures, i am happy to visit abroad for short periods. for the longer term, if anyone wishes to study with me on an intensive/extensive basis, it needs to be england (this for several reasons). england may well depend upon the results of the first-generation Crafties' work with their direct students.
meanwhile, a yo! from atlanta where the L3 begins tomorrow.
And a little practicing on an Ovation, generously lent to me. It is set up with the NSTrings. These are a well-balanced set, beginning with 059 for the bottom C, excellent for playing bass lines. For me, these heavy gauges are a form of torment when playing above the 5th. Position and attempting anything other than bass lines. My own playing calibration is presently set to Les Paul, both electric gauges & distance between strings. This makes me an even more useless Ovation player than anyone else on the course.
19.18 In the first three minutes of the guitar meeting so many exotic notes appeared that the richness of the concoction sent me from the room. The noticeboard declares that we are leaving at 20.00 for a dinner on the town. Curt arrives at 22.30 if ontime.
"If you wish to change the world, better first to know the world you wish to change."
