Living by the Lists

November, 2011

I’m going to be brave and post a VERY rough, skeletal rehearsal take of “Victory Speech”, slated to be the title track of our upcoming album, which will be the third record we’ve made together.  Hopefully before long we’ll have a more complete and polished version of this piece in the not-too-distant future by when I will be further along in this transformational effort!

My life seems to have traditionally been overrun with lists.  To-do lists, shopping lists, packing lists, set lists, etc.  Since I did Ariel Hyatt’s blogging challenge last year (and won second place in that nationwide contest!!), a new list has been added: a daily list of “little victories”, or things that I was successful in accomplishing every day, however big or small.  This also includes things that happen as a result of earlier successes.  For example: what today is on the little victory list as “finally got artwork, etc., to printers to make business cards” could turn into getting a call a year later from someone who picked up our card at a show and now wants to hire us to play at their wedding.  I typically keep my list up on my computer screen and populate it as I go about my day, and have noted that it is a good thing to be able to have it to refer back to at the end of a really shitty day and see that I had indeed been successful at something.  Here’s an example:

11/27/11

did a.m. chant
did chakra exercise
did a little a.m. practicing (instrument)
worked on embassy project
worked on elements for hard copy press kits
Chi got called for an audition for a commercial (answered prayer!)
did more laundry
replaced blender drive coupling
took out trash
reinstalled G drive and got it running again
reviewed still photos with new drummer for website

11/28/11

did am chant
did chakra exercise
did a little am practicing
Chi got the audition/was selected! (answered prayer!)
got the pizzas done within a reasonable amount of time

I have recently added a spiritual practice to the beginning of each day, and as I succeed in ratcheting up the time I go to bed and the time I wake up to allow more time for preparation before I begin my day, I plan on adding a ritual of reviewing my to-do list and selecting a specific array of tasks to accomplish each day, which will ideally move off the to-do list and onto the list of little victories at the end of each day.  That reminds me that I need to revisit and update the list of goals I wrote out as part of an exercise during the above-mentioned blogging contest and post it in my home office where I can see it each day.

Another critically important ritual I am currently in the process of programming into my morning routine is personal practice time.  The time change in early November provided a unique opportunity to wake up at essentially the same time but have it be one hour earlier, making it far less overwhelming of a prospect to roll back my daily timeline by two hours in order to allow a worthwhile amount of time to get my own needs met before I’m at the mercy of everyone else’s demands.  The next thing to be re-integrated is physical exercise.

So why has it taken me until now to establish a daily routine that by any reasonable account ought to be a lifelong matter of general principle for anyone in my profession?  Well, to make a very long story short, I have had a long and unfortunate history of letting myself be taken hostage by other people and their agenda for me, instead of actively taking control of my own life and managing it in a way that makes sense for me, and especially over the past dozen years or so I’ve been having to make do with utterly inadequate conditions and do without getting my basic needs met at all, while being desperately short of any quality downtime or rest — i.e., being forced into a basic M.O. that is totally wrong and inappropriate for me — so trying to cram another time consuming thing I have to do into the front end of my day has taken a back seat to simply trying to survive my life.

I also was recently introduced to the concept that when we are not looking forward to what the next day will bring, or worse still, even dreading it, the natural response is to put it off as long as possible, which typically manifests as staying up very late at night doing nothing in particular (what always happens in my case once I reach the point where I am too exhausted and/or drunk to do any more actual work, but for whatever reason do not think to extricate myself from the inertia and go to bed) simply to postpone the inevitable: that the next time I open my eyes, I will be faced with another 18 hours or so of utterly uninspiring bullshit drudge work to have to slog through, compounded by having to come home most evenings and deal with an abusive, drug-addicted mental case after putting in my eight hours on the Boredom Treadmill.

So, now that I am aware of this, I can fix it!  That entails a formidable challenge in restructuring the evenings when Chi is home (I pray fervently every day for him to get called for acting jobs that last well into the evening!), and wrenching myself free from his mindless, drug-addicted M.O. of doing appetizers with wine as soon as I get home from the day job (which completely sucks away any energy I might still have left after work, leaving me in a very debilitated, groggy state in which it is impossible for me to produce any quality output during the only time I really have available to do so, which is intensely frustrating), followed by our daily Panache rehearsal (for which I have heretofore had no regular opportunity to adequately prepare), then I have to make a big dinner that I cannot serve until Chi has finished getting high and getting drunk and doing his own practicing, often coming into the kitchen to harass and pester me while I’m trying to cook, usually resulting in a big fight that ruins dinner and totally stresses me out and sucks even more of my energy into that tiresome and toxic black hole, and then having to eat the big, heavy meal at 11:00 at night or thereabouts, leaving me painfully stuffed and unable to get a decent night’s sleep, and then after that he usually insists on delaying me even further from getting to bed, which subjects me to an even more miserable time of it the next day, and that goes on and on day in and day out.

Conversely, when he is gone in the evenings, I am free to come home from work, feed the cats, make/eat a quick, simple dinner (only one!), quickly and efficiently deal with household chores, avoid alcohol, and use my available time and energy constructively, while enjoying a bit of peace and quiet.  If he is gone until late enough, then I can usually also get to bed at a reasonable time, virtually assuring better conditions for the next day, or at least the parts of it that I can control.  This also makes it considerably easier to find the motivation and energy to slog through the endless administrative/ marketing/ promotional drudge work for our musical project in the evenings.  Since he has been working fairly regularly as an actor for the past year and continuing into the present one, that has given me some time and opportunity to gradually whittle down the enormous backlog of stuff on my ever- nauseating to-do list while reducing the constant and distressing sense of total overwhelm.

 

Successes and Failures

Listen while you read to “T’z Blues” from TPO’s “10 Strings” album.

January 18, 2012

Referring to my previous post, this is what I was successful in accomplishing:

Demolish & Restore Cat Shit Corridor

Shop for required materials
clean/prime/paint/seal walls
bleach/strip/sand the floor
varnish/seal the floor
reconfigure/put the space back together

shopping list:
fuckload of low-grit belt sandpaper (36 & 50)
oil-modified polyurethane (1 gallon)
GOOD respirator w/charcoal cartridges (may be dealing w/asbestos)
Klean-Strip ADHESIVE REMOVER
couple more paint pans
check supply of rollers – may need one more
a bunch of clear plastic to mask off work area & contain the mess from the sanding dust (& potential asbestos) but still get the light from ofc

Finish the garden (* = heavy lifting chores requiring energy)

Shop for transplants (at least, a few parsley plants, 1 more celery, Corsican mint, chamomile)
* transplant the bamboo & bougainvilla
* build roof for back container cage & manage the plants (think through addition of barrel or smart pot for blueberry bushes!)
* empty sink out front & transplant tarragon & celery
re-plant cat grass
prune rose bush & banana plants
harvest Hubbard squash & pull out dead plant, try to get trellis out too
deal with citrus grove (clean, plant CA poppies, take down/rethink fence)
* finish amending/planting front garden
cover all new beds w/garden fleece

shopping list:
transplants: parsley, celery, Corsican mint, chamomile
AT ANAWALTS, ASK FOR EXTRA EMPTY FLATS!

Administrative B.S.

2011 taxes – file city tax, get all stuff ready, make appt. for 1040 prep
Renew drivers license (Thursday am 1/19)

Deal with all the administrative junk sitting on the side of my desk

Deal with M.O.O.P. (Matter Out Of Place)

All the extra junk in the office
videocassettes – (dimensions of rack I ordered: 15 7/8″ x 8 7/8″) – mount on side of TV armoire & cover w/curtain (2 long-ish wood screws w/wire)

Mess, clothes, etc., in main bedroom

Sort out the confused pile of shit on the bar

Reconfigure desk/set up HDMI monitor

Cleaning:

clean the pestilential kitchen & bathroom
clean make-up brushes
do laundry

Organization projects/Paper Disaster Management: (may need some new binders)

Operation manuals
Recipes
Contact info
Sheet music
put together at least one photo exhibit to dress up the wall in Cat Shit Corridor (if possible, one more for main bedroom)

Other:

Figure out live streaming/get it set up

Send 10 Strings off for review/radio play (dance thing & Brazilian radio stn)

Make a Panang curry paste
Juice/zest/freeze a fuckload of key limes, make a pie with the rest

If possible:

Finish kitchen curtains and make some for bathroom

Try to get these measured/spec’d out by Friday evening so I can get them to the cleaning shop to cut/hem on Saturday afternoon while bleach is drying

Re-do Chi’s room

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Unfortunately nothing south of the garden shopping list got done, even partially, so I’ve got my work cut out for me next time Chi makes himself scarce.

I was truly knackered from spending the entire three-day weekend working my ass off at the cat piss eradication effort and getting the front garden managed and planted for winter/spring plus whatever other stuff I managed to get done, and had a lousy headache and a respiratory reaction from breathing bleach fumes while demolishing the floor in Cat Shit Corridor, and adding insult to injury, the rag also descended on Wednesday (the day Chi was supposed to come home), so I stayed home from the day job to recover.  It worked out well since I had really needed a full day/evening where I could be home and observe the cats as they got used to their new toilet arrangements that I wasn’t able to put together until the previous day by when the varnish on the floor had sufficiently dried; all the new smells, etc., and be able to deal with any issues that might arise before Chi came back with all his dysfunction and chaos.  Fortunately none did, and the transition went splendidly.  Hallelujah!!  All of the cats readily used their new boxes with no confusion, although some of them still continued to also use the old ones, a couple of which I placed in different areas of the house.

The big Fail occurred that night when Chi came home from his trip (surprise!).  We enjoyed a couple hours of civil interaction at first, but as soon as he switched from drinking white wine to the hard stuff (gin with a little soda water – he mixes it strong – more about this later) and went out to the living room to practice while I made dinner, the sounds emitting from the living room indicated that as his blood alcohol content increased, his behavior became increasingly aggressive and hostile.  As has happened countless times before, just as I was approaching the final stages of getting dinner on the table, he came into the kitchen and did his aggression/ intimidation thing (which never works since I do not find the spectacle of a spoiled toddler throwing a drug-addled temper tantrum the least bit intimidating, but for what it’s worth, that means intruding into what I am doing, meddling, violating my personal space, verbally abusing/vituperating at me trying to provoke a fight, etc., i.e., generally making an intolerable nuisance of himself).  “Great!”, I thought.  “So this is the bloody thanks I get for knocking myself out to make a big dinner for him at his request since he got home earlier than expected, even though I am sick and exhausted and certainly wouldn’t have bothered with it if he were still gone!”

Needless to say, dinner was a miserably uncomfortable, stressful affair with him verbally abusing me the entire time (as usual under such circumstances), so as usual when this occurs, I finished eating as quickly as I could, washed the dishes, and retreated to my home office to get away from him and check Facebook and/or piddle about until I was ready to go to bed.  It gets better.  He eventually let himself into my office and continued vituperating at me, trying his best to provoke a fight.  I really wish I’d heeded the little voice of my intuition and installed a sliding bolt lock on the second door to the office while he was gone.  There are two points of entry, and only one is secured.  Apparently he was desperate for a trauma-drama fix and energy/ “narcissistic supply” feed-up since he had been in a situation for five whole days where he had to keep his mental illness and drug addiction under wraps and give the impression of being a perfectly decent, normal person.

I tried playing possum and going in the adjacent bedroom, changing into my PJ’s, putting in my earplugs, turning out the lights and getting in bed, while telling him repeatedly to take his drug addiction and mental sickness elsewhere, but he persisted.  I thought, “Fucking wonderful”.  So this is the extra-special way he pays me back for spending the time that he was gone on his holiday trip slaving away correcting an intolerable household situation (i.e., the house stinking of cat piss and perpetuating Jaco’s inappropriate elimination issues)!  The noise he was making indicated that he was displeased that I hadn’t instead spent the three-day holiday weekend practicing my instruments all day.  In fact, he didn’t even know whether I had practiced or not.  It was just standard-issue alcoholic/ narcissist behavior straight out of the DSM IV.

He sat down just inside the bedroom door and kept yammering on and on, and had apparently turned the volume all the way up on some video he had streaming on his computer in his room at the other end of the hall, preventing me from going to sleep (it was around 11:15 PM by that point), and said something to the effect that if I wouldn’t get out of bed and fight with him to the death (or some asinine bullshit like that!), then he would throw his drink in my face.  He started walking around to where I was lying, and considering that I couldn’t see any way that having the bedding drenched in alcohol would produce any useful result, and God knows what else he was going to do, and I had exhausted my options for passively managing the situation by that point, I leaped out of bed and shoved him toward the door and out of my room, bashing the holy shit out of my left lower leg on the bed post in the process.

He must have dropped his drink, so he went back to the kitchen to get another one, which he came back into the room with and threw in my face, no doubt splattering it all over my clothing lining the wall beside where I was standing, not to mention my pyjamas, my hair, the carpet, the turtle’s house, etc., etc.  It was gin, and burned the hell out of my eyes.  Again, I shoved him out the door and slammed it shut.  He came back in again and continued abusing and harassing me, so I got more physical in trying to drive the point home that his presence was not welcome, thinking, “Bleeding marvelous!  Just what I need while I’m still sore from all the hard, physical work I did while he was gone, plus my headache: a god-damned fist fight!

After that hysterical ordeal, I was too agitated to get to sleep, and spent the night watching the clock change time.  he kept on making noise until sometime after 2:30 a.m., and then it got quiet.  At any rate, I got up a little too late to get a shower, so I had to go to work smelling like a cantina and with no sleep to speak of.  I decided that the little bit of time I had available before I left would be best spent photographing my injuries and the scene of the incident, so I wasn’t able to do my morning practice either.  Not the best way to start a day….

 

The Best-Laid Plans….

Listen while you read to “I’m on the Run”, slated for TPO’s upcoming album, “Victory Speech”

01/14/2012

Chi is going on a hiking trip for this holiday weekend, plus a couple days, so this is what I plan on accomplishing (The stuff that’s crossed out is what I finished yesterday afternoon since my day job was over early):

Demolish & Restore Cat Shit Corridor

Shop for required materials
clean/prime/paint/seal walls
bleach/strip/sand the floor
varnish/seal the floor & walls
reconfigure/put the space back together

shopping list:
fuckload of low-grit belt sandpaper (36 & 50)
oil-modified polyurethane (1 gallon)
GOOD respirator w/charcoal cartridges (may be dealing w/asbestos)
Klean-Strip ADHESIVE REMOVER
couple more paint pans
check supply of rollers – may need one more

a bunch of clear plastic to mask off work area & contain the mess from the sanding dust (& potential asbestos) but still get the light from ofc.

Finish the garden

Shop for transplants (at least, a few parsley plants, 1 more celery, Corsican mint, chamomile)
transplant the bamboo & bougainvilla
build roof for back container cage & manage the plants (think through addition of barrel or smart pot for blueberry bushes!)
empty sink out front & transplant tarragon & celery
re-plant cat grass
prune rose bush & banana plants
harvest Hubbard squash & pull out dead plant, try to get trellis out too
deal with citrus grove (clean, plant CA poppies, fix fence)
finish amending/planting front garden & cover all new beds w/garden fleece
if salad still isn’t up yet, re-plant it
re-plant broccoli too if not up yet

shopping list:
transplants: parsley, celery, Corsican mint, chamomile
AT ANAWALTS, ASK FOR EXTRA EMPTY FLATS!

Administrative B.S.

2011 taxes – file city tax, get all stuff ready, make appt. for 990 prep
Renew drivers license (Tuesday am 1/17)
Deal with all the administrative junk sitting on the side of my desk

Deal with M.O.O.P. (Matter Out Of Place)

All the extra junk in the office
videocassettes – (dimensions of rack I ordered: 15 7/8″ x 8 7/8″) – mount on side of TV armoire & cover w/curtain (2 long-ish wood screws w/wire)

Mess, clothes, etc., in main bedroom

Sort out the confused pile of shit on the bar in the kitchen

Reconfigure desk/set up HDMI monitor in office

Cleaning:

clean the pestilential kitchen & bathroom
clean make-up brushes
do laundry

Organization projects/Paper Disaster Management: (may need some new binders)

Operation manuals
Recipes
Contact info
Sheet music
put together at least one photo exhibit to dress up the wall in Cat Shit Corridor (if possible, one more for main bedroom)

Other:Figure out live streaming/get it set upSend 10 Strings off for review/radio play (dance thing & Brazilian radio stn)Make a Panang curry paste
Juice/zest/freeze a fuckload of key limes, make a pie with the restIf possible:Finish kitchen curtains and make some for bathroom

Try to get these measured/spec’d out by Friday evening so I can get them to the cleaning shop to cut/hem on Saturday afternoon while bleach is drying

Re-do Chi’s room

 

Bars or No Bars?

Listen while you read to “Drunkard’s Blues” from “10 Strings” by the Panache Orchestra.

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Mid-November, 2011

I was in a productive streak, busily working through my to-do list that included a list of places to contact to get shows booked with the new trio format now that we have a solid set worked up with our new drummer, as well as some decent demo material, and that list included a few bars.  We haven’t played a bar/club date in nearly two years since I finally put my foot down due to the utter futility of it for our “traditional” acoustic string duo format.  The effect was immediate and devastating.  I’d had a “good” morning so far – got up early, did my morning practice, and went off to the day job feeling engaged and interested in making continued progress, but as soon as I pulled up a blank sheet to begin composing emails to send to a couple bars (during my break at work , and particularly after reading through some online reviews about one of them, I got what felt like a severe allergic reaction: it seemed as if all the air had suddenly been sucked out of my lungs, and I felt totally depressed and lifeless after being perfectly upbeat and animated right up until then.

Man, oh man!  How do I motivate myself to slog through the administrative drudgery of booking my band into places I would probably never frequent out of my own free will?!  I’ve never cared much for bars, and never go to them anymore except at the behest of someone else (usually my husband), and have absolutely no interest in performing in them.  In fact, playing to a distracted, drunk audience is one of the types of shows I find the most demeaning and fatiguing of all, especially when we’re hardly getting paid anything to do it, and worse still, have to go out of pocket to pay our side players!  And as far as I’m concerned, restaurant gigs for the most part fall squarely into that same category, except they traditionally pay slightly better.  To put no finer point on it, having to play these types of gigs is on par with the drudgery of a day job, especially since I’m already fatigued from working the day job by the time I get to the gig!

Nevertheless, some bars have a reputation as being music venues, i.e., places people go specifically to hear live bands, and since we are still at the steep end of the fan base building curve, I guess that means I have to get us in front of people who are interested in live music, so from that standpoint, perhaps it might be worth doing??  Only if we win over enough fans that will consistently show up at our gigs so that I will be able to book us into places I find more favorable to perform at.  The only thing that makes restaurants worth doing (at least as far as I’m concerned) is the fact that they pay (at least some of them, sometimes), and that helps offset the out-of-pocket cost of performing while keeping dates on our calendar at a variety of places for people to come see us.

That brings into play another aspect of fan base building that I find distressing: having to try and figure out how to engage people and keep them engaged, which, being the extreme introvert that I am, does not by any means come naturally!  Also on this same subject, there seems to be something inherently wrong with trying to cajole people into giving up an otherwise free evening when they’re tired from working all day and drive all over hell to come to a place I would probably never even go to myself to see us play under undesirable conditions.  Perhaps that’s another reason why I dislike it so much?

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a simple, clear answer to this dilemma: when something gives me “that” feeling, JUST SAY “NO”!

 

Another year Over….

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Listen while you read to  “March for the 21st Century”.  This was taken during TPO’s first rehearsal with our new drummer.  He’s a quick study!

I’d love to have soundtracked this post with John Lennon/POB’s “Happy Christmas/War is Over” (you know, the one that goes,

“so this is Christmas

and what have you done?

Another year over,

and a new one just begun….”),

but I maintain a policy of using only our own tracks because we own all the rights to them

January 5, 2011 (Finally, a post that’s not months after the fact!)

A belated happy Christmas and New Year to everyone!

So what have we done during 2011??  Actually, quite a bit, but since it didn’t readily translate into a significant increase in income, it still feels like we (or perhaps to be more fair, I should say “I”) didn’t do all that much.  Ok, so what the hell did we do (and why do I conflate progress with financial gain, anyway?!)?

Well, 2011 commenced with Chi recovering from major surgery while I worked myself into the ground preparing a few extremely complicated, labor-intensive submission packages for some performance-related opportunities, one that succeeded (well, at least we made the cut.  TPO secured a place on the L.A. County Arts Commission’s Musicians Roster!) and one that failed abysmally (well, actually, the submission didn’t necessarily “fail”, but the response I got certainly did, i.e., they’re only interested in local bands willing to play “for exposure” [= “for free”] at a major venue with massive traffic, so of course in my current battle-hardened state I just dismissed it with my customary “Fuck this shit!”).

We also started 2011 off with signing Chi up with a calling service to get him booked for acting jobs in order to get that extremely time consuming burden off of me, and they kept him working regularly throughout the entire year!  Here’s an example:

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March brought about a series of catastrophic events in Chi’s home country of Japan.  Fortunately none of his/our family/friends were directly affected, but his reaction to it turned our world upside down, so I was especially thankful that he had regular acting work that got him out of the house productively engaged and interacting with other people.

Anyway, toward the end of 2010 we had begun a collaborative project with a San Diego-based band, the Bayou Brothers, which segued into another collaboration with an L.A.-based tribute to “Kansas”.  That completely consumed the first half of 2011, i.e., through June.

As soon as that wound down, Chi went to Cuba on the 4th of July for three weeks to study Cuban music and percussion, and I took that golden opportunity to do a major demolition operation on Panache House.  As soon as he got back from Cuba (and I finished about half of the demolition operation I had hoped to accomplish while he was gone, and was able to clear out and get rid of a bunch of stuff and organize what was left), we had a few days to rehearse intensively to perform at a wedding on July 31st, and then we commenced the process of expanding our format and bringing a drummer on board in preparation for the Cherry Blossom Festival that had been rescheduled for September since the March 11 disaster in Japan pre-empted it from its usual timing during Cherry Blossom season in early April (All their traditional sponsors had sent their money to Japan instead to help with the massive disaster recovery effort.)

Here’s a video clip from that show:

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Expanding the Panache Orchestra’s format totally consumed all of my time and energy Sept. – Oct., and much of October & November got consumed by editing/ uploading/ integrating all the new material into TPO’s web presence and offline promotional materials, and then I spent much of December in an especially bad depressive funk.  These depressive episodes routinely follow periods in which I am working intensely at producing a lot of creative output, typically at an order of magnitude proportional to the scale of what I created/produced, so this one hung on right up until Christmas.  That gave me one week after the depression lifted where I was able to get in a final productive burst where I compiled and sent out a bunch of booking requests for spring of 2012.

We were fortunate to be able to spend Christmas in San Diego with family and friends, and then back up to L.A. for a quiet New Year’s weekend complete with lots of good food (traditional Japanese: sashimi, ozoni soup, etc.), which brings us right up to the present.

We’re looking forward to a fabulous 2012!  How about you?

sashimi for New Year's Eve, and Gureyo queuing up to get her share

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Ozoni soup for New Year's brunch

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Nabe with gin-dara (hot pot w/black cod) for Monday (the day the holiday was actually observed)

 

Weddings or No Weddings?

Listen while you read to “I Will Say ‘I Love You’ Again” from “10 Strings” by the Panache Orchestra.

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ca. August, 2011

I know….WTF?!

To confuse my readers further regarding that cryptic title, I’ll disclose that when Chi and I got married, I opted for No Wedding.  Why?  Well, to put it bluntly and in the simplest possible terms, I couldn’t see any sense in going to that amount of expense and stress over something that had such a statistically marginal chance at surviving long enough to amortize out the cost.  Additionally, I really didn’t think any of my family or friends would be willing to go to the massive expense and disruption of traveling to Japan to attend a wedding, and didn’t want to put that burden on the Japanese side of our family by doing it in the US either.

Furthermore, since I’d been a professional performer for my entire adult life, I had no inclination to put on a hugely expensive, self-sponsored piece of theatre that probably no one would go to.  Besides, Chi’s mother had committed suicide a couple years before we got married, and aren’t weddings mostly for the moms?  In retrospect, I wonder if in making this decision I inadvertently deprived my mother of getting to be the mother of the bride?  My brother and sister in law did a wonderful big wedding a few years earlier, so I figured my dad at least would be happy about all the money I was saving them by opting out.

Anyhoo, the point of this post is about once again being put in the position of having to make a decision about  “weddings or no weddings?”, or “to do or not to do?” in the context of The Panache Orchestra.  Readers are probably still wondering what the hell I mean by that.  Keep reading.

After several inquiries from various couples about to tie the knot, TPO landed our first wedding in July of this year, and what an exquisite wedding it was!  (For clarity, both of us have individually performed at dozens of weddings with different ensembles, and I’ve even done a couple just with solo violin.)  The wedding coordinator and sound engineer who regularly work events at the opulent location where the wedding was held were very complimentary toward us and made a specific point to get our contact information, so it all went swimmingly.

One of the things that made this wedding especially unique and interesting was the choice of music for the processional.  The bride requested violin-guitar arrangements of two of her and her fiancé’s very favorite punk songs, which had already been re-recorded by the original artist (The Vindictives) in “unplugged” arrangements for vocals and guitar with violin and percussion.  It was still a bit challenging to condense them down to only two instruments, but it turned out well, and they sounded perfectly lovely and not at all out of context of our normal repertoire.

As part of the process of creating the custom arrangements, I looked up the original (non-acoustic) versions of the songs, and they were a bit dreadful, even by punk standards.  Chi found the acoustic renditions we were working with poor on the execution side, and the vocals disturbing, even though he couldn’t understand them.  He even went so far as to say “I hope the bride and groom aren’t going to jump off the cliff into the ocean and commit suicide together at the wedding!”  He also remarked that us performing the pieces as instrumentals would spare the couple’s relatives from being mortified at the music selection.

The more I listened to the song that sounded the most suicidal, the more I realized it was actually life-affirming rather than death-affirming, which was confirmed at the wedding ceremony during the vows.  Also, the big smile that lit up the lucky young bride’s face as she began her walk down the aisle while we played the opening bars of “her” song brought tears to my eyes.  But Chi, with his dogmatically judgmental tunnel vision warped by his mental illness and (suspected) alcoholic dementia, adamantly insisted that it was totally wrong and inappropriate, and flatly refused to entertain any positive spin on the concept.  However in writing this, it just occurred to me that Chi has a particular sensitivity to the subject of suicide (in addition to poorly executed music), and that may have been a considerable factor in his intransigence in this particular instance.  After the wedding, he seemed interested in playing more weddings, but insisted that I no longer accept special requests for music outside of our own repertoire.  I don’t know what to say to that other than heave a weary sigh and walk away rolling my eyes at the pointless refusal of an additional income source.

At any rate, I am inclined toward “no weddings” even though it could be a particularly successful and well-compensated market segment for us, simply because they are just too stressful and confining.  They are practically always booked at least 6 months in advance, and I find the prospect of having to cancel on a bride, who is already overwhelmed and under more than enough stress and pressure already, unconscionable except under force majeure conditions (such as the sudden death or hospitalization of a band member).  For that matter, I find the prospect of being held hostage to a gig several months out and forced to endure intolerable asshattery the whole time pretty damned aversive too.

The verdict: given that Chi’s favorite tactic for coercing me into doing his bidding, however outrageous, is to threaten to scuttle performances I have worked very hard to set up, I am leaning in favor of only booking dates that I can easily get out of, so I can just cancel them and tell him to bugger off when he starts up with that infantile nonsense.  And if he makes a routine of it, then just get rid of him altogether and scrap the entire thing.

When (and if) he gets to the point where he is ready to acknowledge that he has a calamitous mental illness that is critically interfering with his ability to lead a normal, productive life and have normal, healthy relationships with other people, or be successful in anything at all for that matter and seek treatment for it, then perhaps I’ll become more willing to trust that he will honor all commitments I make on behalf of our band.

Oh well, I guess I should give a little more clarity about my marriage to Chi, in case anyone might be wondering.  It started out as a romantic relationship that developed into a musical collaboration, and ended up as a hostage situation in which I am literally imprisoned by his drug addiction and mental illness, shackled by a technicality of immigration law since I sponsored his visa.

 

The Great Demolition Operation: Phase 3B – Sanding and Varnishing the Living Room Floor (or Ghetto Home Improvement 101)

Listen while you read to “Selemat Jalan!” from TPO’s “Neo” EP that we recorded in Tokyo in 1998 when we first began our collaboration.  The title of this spirited Latin fusion piece means approximately “Bon Voyage!” in Bahasa Indonesia.  This is in honor of Chi’s musical research trip to Cuba that gave me the opportunity to demolish and remodel the house while he was gone Mid-July 2011

After being up late Monday night after the day job stripping linoleum adhesive off the newly-exposed vintage oak flooring from which I had just removed two layers of nasty-ass linoleum tiles, Tuesday was garbage day, so after getting home from the day job, running through the routine of changing into my demolition clothes, feeding the cats, wolfing down a quick, simple dinner cobbled together from whatever scraps were left in the now nearly depleted and disastrously dysfunctional kitchen that was full of displaced stuff from the living room, it was time to face the dreaded dilemma of figuring out how to get the garbage bin that was stuffed full of heavy linoleum tiles from its place in the parking area behind the house down the fairly steep, narrow driveway, across the street, and up onto the sidewalk on the other side for pickup the next morning.  A cluster-fuck was not unanticipated.  The only uncertainty was the manner in which it would unfold.

With the same intense effort of will through which I pushed the massive TV/armoire inch by inch across the living room floor, I similarly maneuvered the way-overloaded trash bin across the flat part of the parking area towards the driveway and paused at the top.  The bin had wheels on the back side, so I tipped it back, balanced my own weight carefully while stepping on the axle, and rode it down the driveway to the sidewalk.  Well, that would have worked out spendidly, had I remembered the track for the gate at the end of the drive and stopped before I hit it.  Fortunately I jumped clear and avoided totally eating it, but the bin went over and discharged at least half of its contents all over the sidewalk.  Thankfully the big bags of cat shit that came tumbling out didn’t burst all over the place.  Fuuuuck……

The silver lining (in addition to the cat shit bags remaining intact) was that now the bin was light enough to easily move to the other side of the street instead of having to expend all the energy I had left after working all day to wrangle the thing inch by inch across the street and up onto the sidewalk while people were driving home from their jobs and looking for places to park.  So I trudged back upstairs to get the key to the crawl space under the house, got out our floor dolly, piled on a load of tiles and cat shit, and then made several trips back and forth schlepping stuff to the bin.  A crowd of neighbors had gathered and was looking on in amusement and discussing the garbage incident in a language I do not understand, but the only person who offered to help was a very elderly Chinese woman who looked so frail that I worried stooping down to pick up and lift the heavy tiles would give her a spinal fracture, so I politely declined and thanked her, and finished cleaning up the mess, including all the little broken tile chips that had spilled out.

SOOOOO….after that debacle, I went to Home Depot to avail myself of a pee-wee floor sander that I would stand at least a fighting chance of being able to lift by myself.  I was somewhat annoyed to learn that the newly-discovered, close-to-home Home Depot did not rent tools, but located another one in Cypress Park in the far outback of Chinatown that did, so I went there and came home with a good-sized but still-portable random orbital sander and a bunch of sanding discs of varying grits to sand the rest of the fossilized linoleum adhesive off the floor and generally even out the whole surface.  After wrangling the unwieldy machine out of its case, figuring out how to attach the vacuum bag, fit it with a sandpaper disc (I started with 36-grit), and plugging it in, I lifted it off the floor and trepidaciously threw the switch, fervently hoping that it would not upon making contact with the floor fling me right out the window and proceed to demolish the entire house unmanned while I walked up the street to the landlord’s place to ask for the key to let myself back in, and have to explain the reason why.

random orbital sander that I rented from Home Depot

After awkwardly maneuvering the machine randomly around over an approximately 6’ x 6’ area of the newly exposed oak flooring, I turned off the sander and stepped back to have a look.  HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT!  The remaining adhesive had indeed come off the part of the floor that the sand paper actually made contact with, but rather than the whole disc making contact, it looked like only the bit around the edge actually had, so the sight that met my horrified gaze was a scribbly maze of squiggly, white-ish lines an inch or two wide. Another problem was that 36 grit was apparently way too coarse for this job, and had left a very rough, scratched-looking surface.  I should have started with a 50 grit disc.

Holy shit! I don't think there's an easy fix for this....

I stood back and contemplated my options.  I decided that the first step would be to change to a 50 grit disc and go over that spot again to try to even out the squiggly lines and very scratchy surface, but it looked like I would then be left with an area of the floor that was a substantially different color than the rest of it, which was a nice shade of reddish golden tan.  The natural color of the wood under the existing finish was very light, as apparently white oak was commonly used for floors in the era when this building was constructed.  I could sand the entire floor down to the raw wood and then go get some stain and refinish it and then varnish it over, but that would be way too time consuming and costly.  I decided to just try to even out the squiggles, perhaps finishing with the belt sander, and attempt to blend the edges into the surrounding wood, and then hope the varnish would darken up the bare-stripped spot enough so that the contrast wouldn’t be too extreme.

By this point it was becoming increasingly clear to me that time was marching faster than my progress, and that even if I used the right grit of sand paper and did the whole thing with my new second-hand belt sander, which I was able to control much better than the rented orbital one, I just didn’t have enough time left to sand between coats of varnish, so I was going to have to hot coat after all, footprints and lap marks be damned!  The only thing that would majorly suck is if the varnish started peeling off, but I guess I could just sand it and spot-touch it up as needed if that happens.  Hopefully the whole floor wouldn’t suddenly start looking all at once as if it got a serious sunburn!  Bottom line: however bad this ended up turning out, it would still be miles better than that wretched linoleum.  I noted that it was going on 9:00 PM, so too late to return the rental sander that evening and get most of the $30 cost refunded, so I would have to get up early and run it back before work in order to avoid getting charged for a second day.  Bollox…..

Still pretty terrible....

Well, I soldiered on for a couple more hours with both sanders trying to even out the squiggly maze, and was non-plussed by another issue: I realized that the belt sander I had bought at the pawn shop was missing a dust bag.  It blew massive amounts of dust all over the place and made an epic-scale mess!  And it wasn’t mere wood dust.  It was very fine textured, tacky and likely toxic resin/adhesive dust that got all over the room and the stuff hanging on the walls (artwork, instruments, light fixtures, CD racks/CD’s, etc.), all over me, my clothing, in my hair, etc.  Fucking hell!  I can’t remember the last time I felt so totally disgusting as when I collapsed exhausted into bed that night, as I couldn’t be bothered to take a shower first and have to deal with drying my hair.  The bed was already in desperate need of laundering, so more dirt and crap wouldn’t make much of a difference at that point, and I couldn’t see much sense in spending time dealing with laundering the bedding when I was planning on demolishing the bedroom anyway.

Good enough for jazz. Time to varnish!

The next day after the day job, I still had a bit more sanding and a lot of vacuuming to do before I could start putting on the varnish.  After wiping down the whole room to clean up the last of the sanding dust, I was finally ready to switch gears and commence the varnishing phase.  I carefully surveyed the room, cleared all the extraneous stuff (tools, etc.) out of the way, re-read the instructions on the container of varnish, locked down the Panache Cats so we wouldn’t end up with fur and kitty paw prints forever memorialized in the living room floor, and laid out the stuff I would need for varnishing: the beautiful, silky-soft $10 lambswool applicator, the pole to attach it to, a clean paint pan, chemical handling gloves and respirator, eye protection, and a roll of shop towels to mop up spills.  Oh, yeah, and a key to open the varnish can, and a stick to stir the varnish.

I planned my route, starting with the end of the room by the front door, screwed the pole into the applicator, opened the can of varnish, poured some in the paint pan, took off my slippers, and cautiously dipped the applicator into the varnish, and brushed it across the floor.  It felt really smooth and satiny — not like paint at all.  I tried to work quickly in order to maintain a “wet edge” that was supposed to minimize the probability of leaving obvious lap marks.  I only had to refill the paint pan once, and then varnished myself out of the living room, retreating back towards the kitchen.  I paused for a moment and contemplated the beautiful, shiny, glowing oak, freshly stripped, and sporting its first coat of varnish.  The nitrile gloves practically slid off my sweat-drenched hands by themselves, and I expected that the varnish would dry in less than the two hours recommended before applying a second coat (If you wait any longer than that, it will cure too completely to put the next coat on without scuff-sanding it first), given the temperature in the room, which even at 11:15 PM was still quite hot even with the windows wide open.

The first coat. The squiggly spot evened up ok after all.

Unfortunately I hadn’t thought through this operation far enough to figure out where I was going to put the varnish applicator with pole attached between coats, and mindlessly laid it across the utility sink with the paint pan sitting in the sink.  Big mistake!  Unbeknownst to me, it dripped quite a puddle of varnish onto the floor during that interval, which by the next morning had hardened and glued the 40-lb bag of kitty litter that was sitting below the sink to the floor!  Shit…..

Well, I swabbed on the next coat of varnish around 1:00 a.m. and discovered a couple varnish lakes that I hadn’t realized I’d made when putting on the first coat by walking in them, so now I had varnish all over my bare feet — EEEWWW!  I made and ate dinner while waiting for the second coat to dry, noting that that was the first time I’d sat down since about 7:00 that evening.

Trader Joe's and lovely veggies from the Panache Garden to the rescue!

The final coat went on around 03:00 a.m., and then I had to clean the pan and applicator so I could re-use it for the next area to be demolished.  I just put the whole business in the utility sink to soak in water since the varnish I was using was water-based, and collapsed into bed with varnish still on my feet and covered from head to foot with dried sweat and resin-y sanding dust.

- To Be Continued -

 

The Great Demolition Operation: Phase 3A – Stripping the Living Room Floor (or Ghetto Home Improvement 101)

Listen while you read to “Encendido”, a new TPO piece for 2011 in context of the extremely volatile chemicals I was working with described in this post.  Oh, and it’s also a Latin-ish fusion piece in honor of Chi’s research trip to Cuba

Mid-July 2011

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After cleaning/ de-stenching/ sealing the living room walls after work during the week, I could finally begin work on the floors.  We had already removed the shitty carpet from the living room on Christmas Day a year and a half ago when Chi’s gift to me was to hire a slave to come in and clean the absolutely pestilential house, and that was when we found ourselves confronted by the scale of the cat piss problemunder the piano.  That was before we ever even thought about putting an additional litter box under the piano!  It was then that I first got acquainted with the full horror of removing wall-to-wall carpeting: having to pull up all the long strips of wood studded with hundreds of tacks to hold the carpet in place that are nailed securely to the floor around the perimeter of the room, the hundreds of thousands of staples stuck in the floor to tack down the pad under the carpet, the glue, etc. — the wretched business of having to get rid of all that bullshit, so I really should have had a somewhat more realistic idea of what I was up against in taking this on.

What was under the carpet....

close-up of the carpet strips we had to remove

and the zillions of staples stuck in the linoleum to hold the pad (as if it would move anywhere!)

one approach to getting rid of them

sweeping up the mess

First stage of floor demolition accomplished!

Anyway, my motivation was high to get the living room floor stripped of the grotty, nasty-ass linoleum tiles (TWO LAYERS OF THEM!) underneath the carpet we removed a year and a half ago, especially after my discovery that what lay beneath was beautiful, vintage oak!  When I saw that lovely stuff glowing back up at me after trepidaciously pulling up one lino tile, I was ready to have a go at it.

Holy shit! There's oak under here!

Anyhoo, after finishing the walls in the dead of night Thursday and getting to bed around 0330 am, Friday after work I had made plans to go meet an old friend of mine I had recently hooked up with on FaceBook whom I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years, so nothing got done that night.  I had a great time though, and didn’t end up getting home until mid-afternoon on Saturday, so not enough got done that day either.  Nevertheless, while riding my scooter from Venice Beach back to Chinatown, the route I took led me to make the earth-shattering discovery that there is a Home Depot practically right down the street from my friggin’ house!  I had no idea!!  More ironic still, it’s right next to the hospital where I have taken Chi dozens of times for various appointments over the past couple years.  If I had only known that a long time ago, it would have saved me endless time, gas and grief.

When I got home, I decided based on my research that I would need a belt sander whether or not I actually went ahead and rented a floor sander (and for that matter, it would also come in handy for future household repair jobs other than this one), and went to a pawn shop down the street where I have bought several power tools in decent shape for dirt cheap to look for a belt sander.  They had a nice little Makita that I bargained down and picked up for $40, and then I went a couple blocks further to the newly-discovered Home Depot to buy sandpaper for the new belt sander, where I happened to note that the belt sander I had just bought second-hand for $40 would have cost somewhere in the region of $140 new.  That ate up the remainder of the afternoon, so I ditzed around for a little bit, fed the kitties, made a quick dinner in the increasingly dirty and dysfunctional kitchen and finally got ready to commence the next phase of the project.

After putting on eye protection, a dust mask and heavy work gloves to being seriously demolishing the living room floor, I realized that I hadn’t actually finished painting the walls Thursday night after work as I’d thought.  I had only done Stink Corner so that I could pull up the linoleum in that area and bleach/sanitize the underlying wood flooring and let it dry prior to commencing major demolition operations.  I took off the demo gear, re-outfitted myself appropriately for handling paint (chemical respirator, latex gloves, I dispensed with the knee pads this time since they caused more pain by cutting off my circulation than they saved when I had to kneel.  That was when I understood that there is a big difference between knee pads that are designed for sports – that are mostly played on one’s feet – and (considerably more expensive) construction knee pads that are especially designed for being on one’s knees!), got the paint, roller, paint pan, shop towels, etc., back out and finished painting the living room walls.

After changing back into the demo gear, I picked up the Floor Bully (long-handled floor scraper) tool that I had bought during the initial mission to Home Depot , and had a go at the floor, wedging the blade between a linoleum tile and the underlying hardwood and giving it a good push.  In most cases, I was able to slide the scraper far enough to pry up several tiles at once with both layers still stuck together.  We had a bunch of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods paper grocery bags piled in the kitchen, and once a fair number of pried-up tiles had accumulated, I broke them apart and put them into a doubled-up grocery bag and carried them out to the trash.  I was surprised at how much those things weigh.  Two bags’ worth of tiles was all I had the energy for that evening, so I called it a relatively early night and went to bed with plans to get up early the next morning and finish the job.

Well, when I woke up the next morning, I realized that there was no easy breakfast-like food left in the house, so I decided to hop on my scooter and ride down Sunset Blvd. and stop at the first Mexican fast food joint that caught my eye and have a breakfast burrito.  For some reason I didn’t see anything that looked open quickly enough to stop without having to majorly double back, so I ended up riding all the way to a shop Chi and I like in Los Feliz.  It took quite a bit longer than I’d planned on to ride there and back, which took a chunk out of my morning.

When I finally got home after that unexpected odyssey and was putting my scooter away out back, I heard a cat calling.  Puzzled, I meowed back at it while slowly walking toward the front of the house where the sound was coming from.  The cat and I kept up our conversation, and when I got near the front of the house and looked up, I was astonished to see Pink sitting out on the veranda wall looking down at me with relief, as if he were saying, “Mommy!  I’m so glad you’re home — I have no idea how to get back in the house!”  I couldn’t fathom how he had got out, and was very worried that the other Panache Cats may have escaped too.  I went in the front gate, climbed up the stairs, picked him up and carried him back out and up the driveway to the back door where I let both of us in, and then made a careful tour of the house to find the rest of the kitties and locate the place Pink had got out of.

It turned out that he had again violated the no-fly zone in the living room and fallen out the window where I noted that the screen had come loose from the frame.  I had been leaving all the windows open to air out the chemical fumes.  Well, I was apparently going to have to keep that one closed.  I was deeply relieved that he’d had the nous to figure out how to get from the driveway where he had fallen, around into the yard, and then up onto the veranda where he would be safe and I could find him easily when I got home, and that he’d had the sense to call out to me when I did.  Laxmi has fallen out the window a couple times and it has taken several days to get her back.

Well, I went back to work and eventually got both layers of skeevy linoleum pried off the living room floor.  Practically all of it came off just by whacking at the tiles with the Floor Bully, but in one place there were a few tiles from the lower layer that were stuck so fast to the wood that I still had to slice them off in tiny little pieces with a painting knife and hand scraper, and dig them out of the wood even after dousing them with solvent to loosen the adhesive.  The biggest pain in the ass of that phase of the demolition was hauling the tiles out to the garbage.  Good thing we’d kept all those grocery bags, which were just the right size and accommodated just enough tiles to match the limit of my strength in carrying them, and were also just strong enough for the bags not to burst open on the way to the garbage.  The tiles from just the living room alone almost completely filled up the trash bin, and I wondered how in the hell I was going to get it down the rather steep driveway and across the street for pick-up on garbage day, as those things were friggin’ heavy!

Pulling up the linoleum tiles, one quadrant of the room at a time

Some tiles (or portions of them) were stuck so fast to the floor that I couldn't lift them with the floor bully

Wellllll…….now I was left with a 2-4 mm-thick layer of linoleum adhesive bonded to the wood floor.  It was actually a nice color – a warm, amber-ish hue that I would have happily left on as a super die-hard wear layer, had it been reasonably smooth, but alas, it wasn’t.  I was also concerned that it might cause adhesion problems with the varnish, depending on how the chemistry of each substance interacted with the other.  So how to get rid of it?  My online research revealed various approaches, using an assortment of things like boiling water, a variety of solvents, and even peanut butter!  For real!

Immediately dismissing the peanut-butter-and- putty-knife method as way too expensive, toilsome and time consuming, I started with the boiling water approach.  Epic Fail.  Didn’t do jack.  I had bought a quart of Klean-Strip paint stripper, but after some research, wasn’t convinced that it was the right chemical for this particular type of adhesive that looked like some sort of expoxy-ish resin-y stuff.  I made another mission to Home Depot and picked up five gallons of acetone (@ $16/gallon).  While I appreciate the risible absurdity of having thought that one little quart of Klean Strip would have been sufficient for this whole production, I’m sure glad I hadn’t bought gallons of it to have to exchange!

Before starting the adhesive removal phase of this operation, I noted that I still had the problem of a few massive objects I couldn’t relocate out of the living room: my grand piano, the ginormous TV & armoire that Chi had bought, and the sofa.  Well, I’ll see if I can at least wedge the sofa into the kitchen, or better yet, upend it and stuff it into Chi’s room until further notice.

At any rate, after some initial anxiety about the extreme flammability of acetone and admonishments I found online against using it for this purpose, I launched into the adhesive stripping phase in earnest.  I began somewhat awkwardly by pouring acetone on a section of floor and trying to spread it somewhat evenly with a paint roller, only to have it immediately flash off in the intense summer heat, dissolving only the uppermost surface of the adhesive sufficiently as to stick to the paint roller and render it useless for any other purpose.  I then tried placing a layer of shitty construction towels I had bought for this job on the floor and dousing them liberally with acetone, again only to have it flash off too quickly and stick the towels to the partially dissolved adhesive.  Well, by that point I was running low on ideas and energy, and left it for the next day after the day job.

the stuff I used for stripping the adhesive off the floor

While at the day job I did a little more research and learned that placing a sheet of plastic over the acetone keeps it from evaporating before it’s done its job.  Armed with that information, I set back to work after feeding the Panache Cats and myself upon my return home for the evening.  It was getting increasingly awkward trying to deal with food with all the displaced stuff piled in the kitchen, and I was running out of food anyway.  I realized that the great big box of humongous landscaper trash bags I bought along with the five gallons of acetone over the weekend would work exceptionally well for this purpose, assuming the acetone wouldn’t dissolve them too, adding yet another layer of crap to have to strip off the wood.

I laid out an array of towels about the size of one of those trash bags on the floor, drenched them with acetone, lay a bag on top, let it sit for 20 minutes or so to give the acetone time to work its magic, and then took off the bag (which fortunately came right up without sticking to anything) and towels and scraped the partially dissolved adhesive off with the floor bully.  It came rolling off in big, sticky globs something like half-cured rubber cement, that were quite a pain in the ass to pick up since they kept sticking all over everything.  I tried my best to gather up all the gunky dissolved adhesive with shop towels and put it in grocery bags to throw in the trash.  For the most part, this proved to be a winning strategy, albeit a painfully slow and labor-intensive one, stripping one 42-gallon trash bag’s worth of floor area at a time.

the bag technique

FIVE FRIGGIN’ HOURS LATER with my hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck and back aching like hell, I was non-plussed to note that I had only stripped ½ to ⅓ of the floor, and there were odd patches where the adhesive had apparently somehow fossilized and wouldn’t dissolve, mostly around the perimeter of the room.  By that point I reluctantly decided that it would be a great idea to rent a floor sander after all, and hoped they had some sort of “pee-wee” model that I would stand at least a fighting chance of being able to lift by myself.  That should make short work of any remaining adhesive residue.

Once I was successful in completely stripping the floor, the next conundrum would be how to go about varnishing it in sections without ending up with an obviously uneven finish.  That made me realize the impracticality of trying to hot coat the floor.  There’s simply too much of it, and I’d inevitably end up with foot prints and/or lap marks, and the end result would be pretty awful.  That further strengthened the case in favor of renting the sanding machine, and allegedly I can sand after only one hour of drying time for the ridiculously expensive oil-modified polyurethane varnish I am using, which wouldn’t add much to the timeline, but it did revive the spectre of the varnish sanding dust spontaneously combusting and destroying our insanely expensive brand-new vacuum cleaner.

- to be continued -

 

Guava Tree Trauma

Listen while you read to “Trying Over and Over Again”, an unpublished track that we have plans to put on an EP of dance pieces whenever we get around to it.

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Halloween weekend, 2011

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The duplex in Chinatown we have lived in for the past three years came with a very productive White Indian guava tree in the tiny front yard.  Each year at the end of guava season I have been pruning it back, learning a little more each season about how it grows.

The White Indian guava tree that was here when we moved in.

The neighbors apparently have a long-running tradition of helping themselves to its bounty each fall, which has wrought devastation on the potager garden I have spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and money to grow in the front, as they apparently come traipsing in and trample all over my other plants, damaging and/or killing them, while compacting the massively heavy clay soil I have spent hundreds of sweaty, back-breaking hours trying to dig and amend into a soft, fluffy condition.  In that light, my pruning strategy has been two-fold: train the tree to grow upward to keep the fruit out of reach from the ground, and also to allow more sunlight to reach the ground where most of my other plants are.

damage to my garden from neighbors coming in to take my stuff

Last year my pruning job was an abysmal failure.  Let’s be clear: I have no experience with this sort of thing at all, and have no clue what I am doing.  My father’s fruit trees were different varieties that required different techniques for managing them (citrus, pear, stone fruit), and his yard was much bigger than mine, so there was no need to train the trees in any particular way.  From my observation, guava trees have a fairly wide, spreading canopy of branches growing every which way and lush green leaves that shed prolifically, making a big mess to have to keep sweeping up.  I guess I could use the fallen leaves as a leaf mulch if I can ever get things to time out right.  Two years ago I hired a landscaper to trim the guava tree.  He gave it a snazzy traditional cut: flat and kind of swirly on top.  That’s a cinnamon sun sunflower in the foreground.

The guava tree with a nice, professional hairstyle

Anyway, last October I gave the tree a sort of crew cut that over the ensuing months the branches grew straight up as planned, except that it looked kind of silly – like a person with mid-back length hair all standing on end.  It also resulted in an especially dense canopy that let even less light in than the swirly flat top the professional landscaper had given it the year prior.  Worse still, the long, upright branches bent down under the weight of the extra-abundant guava crop this year, and got all tangled up in the banana trees and the eaves of the house, totally obstructing the front walkway and even the sidewalk outside, and indeed did not keep the guavas out of reach as hoped.  My plants below the tree nearest the entrance to the yard were looking more and more battered, and in fact, now it looks like only one of my Alpine strawberry plants has survived the frequent incursions by the neighbors.

the guava tree with a bad cut

all tangled up in the banana trees

obstructing the front walk

Anyway, on Sunday I put on the Navy jumpsuit I use for seriously dirty, nasty jobs, heavy work gloves, safety glasses, got the ladder and the tree saw and heavy-duty clippers, and went out to give the guava tree its annual weed whacking.  Throughout the growing season, I had been observing the tree and deciding which big branches to cut, as I planned on taking decisive action to thin out the canopy this year, which meant giving it a more dramatic coiffure.  I stood on the veranda determinedly sawing away, detangling big, heavy, guava-laden branches from whatever they fell onto, and dragging them down to the front walk where I would harvest the guavas and chop the remaining branches up into pieces small enough to fit readily into the yard trash bin.  After a considerable pile of branches had accumulated, Chi came out to help me take off the guavas and put the branches I cut up in the trash.

As we were working away at this, one of our neighbors came by.  He lives in one of the row houses next door, and when we first moved here, was very complimentary of my efforts to transform the tiny plot of ground covered in waist-high weeds into a culinary garden, and said that his sister used to live in our unit and had originally put the guava tree in.  From the mail addressed to former tenants that often appears in our mailbox, they appear to be southeast Asian. He asked if I was cutting it down.  I said no, and explained that I was simply pruning it back now that guava season is winding down, and it will re-grow with a vengeance next spring and produce another mother-lode of guavas in the fall.  Chi filled a bag of guavas for him to take home.  I went back to cutting down branches while Chi kept cleaning, and a short while later the Chinese woman a couple doors up came by and asked presumably the same thing, although I don’t know for sure since she doesn’t speak a word of English.  Chi gave her some guavas and she went on her way.

This happened a few more times, and then our next door neighbor (he is feeble-minded and in quite poor health in general) came out and started having an attack because he too apparently thought I was cutting the tree down.  I kept busy and out of sight working to free the enormous branch I had just cut from the middle of the tree while standing on the balcony that was now all tangled up inside the guava tree, the melon house, the huge winter squash plant climbing up the guava tree, and both mature Cuban banana plants off to the side, while Chi tried his best to figure out what he was going on about, sobbing, whimpering and pointing, muttering something unintelligible over and over.  He seemed very distraught by the fruit tree management operation in progress, and I just didn’t have the time or the moxie at that point to perform mental health triage.  I just resolutely kept cutting and detangling until Chi asked me to bring him some more branches to deal with, most likely so he could imitate my strategy of looking very busy and not have to deal with our raving neighbor.  (more about this neighbor here)

He eventually went back inside, and I finally got the huge branch detangled and dragged it down to Chi where we reduced it.  There was another big branch I had cut from the center of the tree that had fallen outward and got tangled up in the Rajapuri banana plants by the east wall facing the street, so I set the ladder on the sidewalk outside the wall to have a go at extricating it.

As I was up on the ladder struggling to find a position from where I could get some leverage to free the branch, another couple of neighbors came by, and in addition to asking why I was cutting the guava tree down, they started in about the banana flower that was still on the Cuban Red plant on the opposite side of the yard, going on and on about how you have to cut them in order to make the bananas bigger, etc., etc., and asking me all kinds of questions about my banana trees while I was in the middle of managing the guava tree.  So the neighbors are still obsessing over that damn banana flower!

I tried my best to stay focused on what I was doing and on not fall off the ladder onto the sidewalk some eight feet below and possibly cutting my arm off with the huge tree saw on my way down, thinking “JEEZUS, people!  Do you have any f***ing idea how distracting and annoying it is to have to deal with you crowding around pelting me with irrelevant questions while I’m way up on a ladder faced the wrong way on a slope, hanging on for dear life to a slender two-year-old banana tree trying to free a massively heavy guava branch and hold onto a large tool at the same time?!”

They eventually went on their way with a bag of guavas in hand, and as we were in the final stages of cutting up another big branch I had detangled and retrieved, yet another neighbor (a Bangladeshi woman from the apartment bloc on the other side of us) stopped to ask if we were cutting down the guava tree.  Jesus on skis!!  Don’t Asians ever prune their fruit trees?!  For about the ninth time that afternoon I repeated my explanation of what I was doing, and we gave her a bag of guavas too.

After sawing down a couple more really tall, heavy, guava-laden branches in the middle of the tree from my vantage point atop the ladder I had moved to the middle of the yard and it was precariously tilting with one foot landing in a soft patch, and reducing them to a size that could be placed in a trash bag since the bin had overflowed several branches ago, we terminated this insane operation and put the tools away.  I decided those remaining long branches in the middle had to go even though they weren’t particularly obstructing anything, or the tree would look incredibly strange.  As it was, it already looked like a victim of a horrible punk haircut, with one remaining long-ish branch on the north side I had kept to be sure that the tree would have enough green to continue to photosynthesize, and that made it look like the tree was giving the finger to the whole neighborhood.  I knew I would have to do a bit of tidying up, but not tonight.  The poor tree is probably mortified, and I’m sure it’s bizarrely-shorne state is doing precious little to reassure the distraught neighbors.

This is bad.

I mean, this is Really. Bad.

Three hours, four frigging trash bags, plus one large yard trash bin later....

My hands and fingers were so sore that evening I could hardly open the pistachios during appetizers immediately following three straight hours of sawing and chopping and hoisting, and indeed our nightly Panache rehearsal was rather painful.  I can only imagine how much the rest of me was going to hurt by tomorrow and the next day, and I already felt the bruises on my knees/legs developing.  It’s been one hell of a weekend…..

 

A Classic Chinatown Moment

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Listen while you read to “Peacock Hill”, a piece Chi composed in 2009 inspired by the free-roaming herd of peacocks that used to live up the street from us in Chinatown.  Unfortunately a few of them were murdered and others stolen in September 2011, leaving only one young male.  This was a real tragedy, since those peacocks made this neighborhood extra special.

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Late October, 2011

I came home from work last Monday to find Chi in an agitated state.  Nothing unusual about that, especially since March 11.  This time it had something to do with our banana trees I had planted out front shortly after we moved in that have recently begun to bloom and produce fruit.  There is one dwarf Cuban (or is it Jamaican?) Red and one Rajapuri, an Indian variety.  Both are in bloom.

Dwarf Cuban Red banana plant

Rajapuri banana plant

Chi tried his best to explain to me what had occurred that afternoon, and I tried my best to make some sense out of it.  Apparently a couple of the neighbors had come over while Chi was out front, probably getting the mail, and were pointing at the banana flowers and emphatically motioning to cut them off.  Not many of our neighbors speak English (including Chi), and I’m not sure if these particular neighbors speak Chinese or a Southeast Asian language (Thai, Khmer, Lao, etc.) or regional dialect, but suffice it to say, communication can be challenging.

Chi wasn’t sure whether it was for the sake of the developing bananas that the terminal bud on the end of the banana stalk should be removed, or if it is good to eat, and exhorted me to research the matter and take action at once lest the neighbors come back and cut off the buds themselves, wreaking God-only-knows-what mayhem on my garden in the process.  I often get ambushed by situations like this before I have even finished getting in the door coming home from the day job….

close-up of Cuban Red banana stalk

Well, I got him to understand that given the gathering dusk, it was unlikely that the marauding neighbors would come back and loot the banana trees tonight, and to let me research the matter and come up with a plan of action.  For background, we have issues with this type of thing, i.e., neighbors helping themselves to the stuff I grow.  It’s not so bad with the guava tree that came with the house and is a mature tree that produces loads more guavas than we could ever possibly eat during guava season, and in fact, the only problem I have with that is them traipsing through the garden trampling on my other plants and compacting the dirt that I have spent hundreds of sweaty, back breaking hours trying to dig into a light, fluffy condition.  I have lost most of my Alpine strawberry plants to these bi-ped incursions, and my chives are looking very battered these days.  It’s even more annoying still when they take fruit from my two-year-old citrus trees I put in that are barely starting to produce, leaving practically none for us.   I have plans to build a fence this weekend.

damage to my garden from neighbors coming in and helping themselves to my stuff

ripening mandarin oranges on a young dwarf Owari satsuma tree

Back to the banana flowers.  In the process of doing research to try and figure out how to know when the varieties of bananas I have are done, and how to properly harvest and ripen them, I ran across a few accounts of growers’ opinion being split down the middle over whether to cut off the terminal bud containing male flowers that do not develop into bananas.

I had to dig deeper to find out about the edibility of the banana blossoms.  After a fairly extensive search, I found a few recipes covering a wide geographic range: Thailand/SE Asia, tropical China/Taiwan, India, Philippines and Indonesia.  Researching the recipes was difficult since I don’t know the names of any dishes made with banana blossoms, and in fact, didn’t even realize that they were edible in the first place!  This research also yielded some arcane factoids, such as banana flowers being full of vitamins, high in fiber and iron, and especially good for lactating women.

While searching for recipes, I had come across references that banana blossoms can be steamed and eaten like artichokes, but haven’t yet been able to dig up an actual recipe.  I wondered, “do you just steam them and serve them with melted butter to dip the leaves in?”  We were having a friend over for dinner Friday night, and as much as I loved the idea of serving an exotic dish with a spectacular presentation, since we only have two banana flowers to work with right now, I didn’t want to take a chance on ruining one and have the main dish for a dinner party turn out abominably due to an experiment gone awry, so I decided to try a more common recipe.  I settled on a simple one from the Philippines.

When I came home from the day job on Friday, I rounded up Chi, put on my gloves, and got out the ladder and my big pruning shears to go cut the flower from the Rajapuri tree that was hanging conspicuously over the sidewalk, hoping the neighbors hadn’t beat me to it.  It was still there, so I cut it off, and Chi caught it as it fell.  My research indicated that you’re supposed to leave a solid 12 inches of stalk at the end in case it starts to dry out or rot, so the ripening bananas won’t be affected.  Now it was time for a new and exotic culinary adventure!

In all of the recipes I looked at, you have to prepare the banana flower by peeling off the tough outer petals (just like an artichoke), and then chop it up and either rub it well with salt and lemon juice or soak it for at least an hour in salted acidulated water.  All the recipes I consulted were for some sort of curry-type dish.  There are also recipes for banana flower soup and salad too, so perhaps I’ll investigate those in the fullness of time, as I expect the second of my Rajapuri banana plants will bloom in the fairly near future, and we still have the flower on the Cuban Red.

Rajapuri banana blossom

The Indians recommend putting coconut oil on your hands when preparing banana flowers due to the sticky sap that stains everything black, while the white folks seem to prefer wearing gloves, possibly because coconut oil is so bloody expensive here?  Especially if you buy the pure, organic African red coconut oil from Whole Foods, so I opted for the gloves, but again I digress…..

You're supposed to start by cutting the top off to facilitate removing the tough outer petals

It's nice to keep a few of the male flowers between the petioles to garnish the finished dish with, but they should be treated the same as the rest of the flower

Removing the tough outer petioles from the banana flower. They make lovely serving dishes!

then you chop it up

All the recipes I looked at said to chop it finely like cabbage

Then you put it all in a pan with salted lemon-water and let it sit for at least an hour to leach out the bitter juices.

I got the banana flower prepped without incident, got the table set with a spread of appetizers before our dinner guest arrived, and after a wonderful time snacking and catching up, began making the pièce de résistance.  Both of them!  I had also grown a beautiful Japanese chirimen squash, and found a simple and delicious-sounding French recipe to try with it.

baby Japanese chirimen squash

Is it ready yet??

Appetizers, Panache-style!

stuffed chirimen squash ready to go in the oven!

finished banana flower curry

By the time the banana flower dish was ready, we were all so full from the ample and diverse appetizers and so drunk that I doubt any of us particularly noticed how it tasted, or the squash either, for that matter.  It wasn’t a disaster though, and the tremendous fun was worth the wretched hangover the next day.

Dinner's finally ready!

Chi consoles Jaco, who was miffed that there was nothing at all of interest to the Panache Cats since we did a vegetarian meal this time.

There was a fair bit of both dishes left over, so a few days later I decided to try the banana flower again, reviving it with the rest of the can of coconut milk I had originally used half of to cook it the first time, and adding a sprinkling of muscovedo sugar from Mauritius.  It wasn’t all that spectacular, but now I have a basic reference on this vegetable, and can improvise a bit with the next one.  The chirimen dish was similarly underwhelming, and I suspect that I harvested the squash before it was fully ripe.  I would truly love to grow my own coconuts and extract the milk myself, but that’s entirely too time consuming and labor intensive!  I wonder if any of the markets in Thai Town a bow-shot west of us on Hollywood Blvd. sell fresh coconut milk?