{"id":1831,"date":"2019-06-02T16:48:45","date_gmt":"2019-06-02T20:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2019-06-02T16:48:45","modified_gmt":"2019-06-02T20:48:45","slug":"remediation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/02\/remediation\/","title":{"rendered":"Remediation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>2019 has shaped up to be an invisibly productive year thus far. I say that because I haven&#8217;t much to show for it. Save a couple pit gigs and a one-off crashing of a <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/12\/new-listen-the-forgotten-prophets-the-end\/\">Forgotten Prophets<\/a> show, my itinerary has been empty. That said, in some ways I&#8217;m in the best musical shape since <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/24\/paternity-leave\/\">my son&#8217;s arrival<\/a> over four years ago. I&#8217;ve made a conscious effort to batten down the hatches and consistently practice with an eye toward goals both big and small. Some tangible victories include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>My clarinet playing being the best it&#8217;s been. It&#8217;s an instrument I&#8217;ve never really enjoyed playing, doing it only when I must. But I did have a few days this year where&#8212;gulp&#8212;I had fun playing it.<\/li><li>Reacquainting myself with a number of forgotten jazz standards. A decade ago I could do a 4-hr. jazz gig and barely need charts except for the original tunes. That said, I haven&#8217;t had a regular jazz gig in a number of years, and therefore no need to retain or practice them. It&#8217;s been nice to wake those particular muscles. <\/li><li>Progressing with some long-intended transcriptions. <\/li><li>Learning some new classical literature. Putting together a recital or something similar at this point would be completely impractical, and nothing I&#8217;m that interested in doing. However, it&#8217;s been great to be able to get back in that mindset to some degree.<\/li><li>Glacially paced improvement in <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/26\/old-dog-new-tricks\/\">music technology<\/a> matters, including some recording here and there.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So, those are some wins. Of course, there have been drawbacks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Ensemble performance. The pit gigs were fine, but I definitely felt caught flat-footed a couple times on stage with the Prophets. Even though I was just sitting in on the show with little prep, I definitely felt rusty at times when it came to playing in a live, improvised setting. I don&#8217;t know how it sounded or appeared, but I definitely had some internal unease. It&#8217;s a scenario that, years ago, would&#8217;ve been a non-issue. <\/li><li>External momentum. While I&#8217;ve been diligent about sheddin&#8217; in the basement, I can&#8217;t say the same for playing beyond my property. Much of that has been because I&#8217;ve hit a brick wall with trying to make inroads locally. The union is a social and political network that I can&#8217;t seem to crack, despite having joined years ago and making and reaching out to contacts over the years. In other words, &#8220;Seat&#8217;s taken!&#8221; Turf wars and the <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/20\/the-cold-crossfire-of-competitive-self-interest\/\">cold crossfire of competitive self-interest<\/a>. Such is life in a metropolitan area where seemingly everyone&#8217;s a townie or close to it. <\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, I suppose I should focus on the silver lining. There have been improvements, even if only I know about them. And, playing aside, I&#8217;ve made a point to do much more active listening these last several years. One consequence of that&#8212;or was it the other way around?&#8212;is that I&#8217;ve gone on a CD-buying tear since <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/19\/change-of-scenery-me-time\/\">moving from Michigan<\/a>, increasing the frequency I&#8217;d already been maintaining. In the beginning, I&#8217;m sure part of it was retail therapy to go along with the move. But also, for a time, I was just a few miles from Buffalo&#8217;s Record Theatre, a local institution that I&#8217;d been frequenting for nearly a decade. Of course, it was just my luck that it <a href=\"https:\/\/recordtheatre.com\/about-record-theatre\/\">permanently closed<\/a> the following year. Anyway, the shopping has generally continued nonetheless. I&#8217;ve yet to get into vinyl, so CDs are my physical copy of choice. I know, it makes me a ridiculous luddite, yada yada. I still think there&#8217;s value in curating a personal library. Also, it&#8217;s nice to not be completely reliant on the cloud for all my needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eventually my schedule and availability will lighten up some, particularly when the little guy goes to school, at which time I&#8217;ll be able to plant more irons in the fire. And when that happens, I&#8217;ll be glad to have spent this time buffing out the wear and tear&#8212;taking the time to actually work things out as opposed to maintaining between gigs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Music (mostly) aside, I&#8217;ve also made a point to consistently read more for pleasure. Not only has that been good for the eyes to lose the screens for a bit, but it&#8217;s just been good for the mind to focus on longer narratives, fiction or otherwise. (This does include re-reading <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/05\/further-down-the-river-of-fundament\/\">Norman Mailer&#8217;s <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/05\/further-down-the-river-of-fundament\/\">Ancient Evenings<\/a><\/em>. Of course.) Right now I&#8217;m nearing the end of <a href=\"http:\/\/boulezian.blogspot.com\/2019\/03\/my-new-book-arnold-schoenberg.html\">Dr. Mark Berry&#8217;s new Schoenberg biography<\/a>, which I&#8217;m quite enjoying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Additionally, I&#8217;ve been working on a lead from the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/06\/matthew-barneys-redoubt-at-yale-university-art-gallery\/\">Redoubt<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/06\/matthew-barneys-redoubt-at-yale-university-art-gallery\/\"> premiere<\/a>, as the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/07\/matthew-barney-jonathan-beplers-river-of-fundament\/\">River of Fundament<\/a><\/em> obsession continues. More about that if anything ever comes of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And here we are: June 2019. I only really know that from looking at the calendar. That&#8217;s fine. The seasons keep changing and the work continues. Whether it&#8217;ll amount to anything is an open question. Admittedly, my not-quite-suppressed nihilism make me think it doesn&#8217;t really matter either way. But at least I&#8217;m enjoying doing it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2019 has shaped up to be an invisibly productive year thus far. I say that because I haven&#8217;t much to show for it. Save a couple pit gigs and a one-off crashing of a Forgotten Prophets show, my itinerary has been empty. That said, in some ways I&#8217;m in the best musical shape since my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}