Tag Archives: music

Tavernier Retreat

If you’ve been treated to a delightful retreat and blog about it, and then others tweet about your post and still others send the message along to their own followers, does that count as retreating or retrweeting?

We live in complicated times.

And that’s why the opportunity for us to stay for a week in late August in Rick and Dana’s new little cottage in Tavernier, Florida, was so incredibly welcomed.

This summer, the Sordahls took an 80-year old getaway and converted it into a delicious vision of gracious space, enviable green economy of scale, and gentle generosity that seems to be uniquely theirs to employ on the planet.

Fortunately for Rick and me, they offered it to us at exactly the time in our life when we really needed grace, space, gentleness, and evidence of generosity in the world.

We needed a runway to visualize a new future for ourselves. And there’s nothing like nowhere to be and two rocking chairs on a porch with an ocean view to get some life direction thinking done.

The ocean front 25 yards away is the real thing. There’s no shipped-in sandy beach, no tiki bar, or no resort-style handsome pool boy with fresh towels and a margarita anywhere in sight, unless you count Rick, which I most certainly do.

While he never actually schlepped towels to the waterfront…

… Rick did bring his guitar down to the little bench and serenaded me and our new friend with beautiful acoustic Brazilian jazz.

Others hung out to enjoy the music, too.

It’s a genuine neighborhood, complete with kids who are allowed to ride their bikes to the waterfront, barefoot and helmet free.

There was something about this dude that helped nudge the life-reorienting thinking project in a most helpful direction.

If you could ride anywhere you wanted, barefoot and with the wind blowing through your bean shave, where would you go? This seemed like the right kind of place and time to ask such a question.

The delightful cottage itself was also the perfect host for this line of thought.

Dana brings an exquisite touch of “just right” to every space she engages. Somehow in an area of about 700 sq. ft, there wasn’t one necessary thing missing…

… yet she left room to breathe and imagine and rest.

Not a bad idea for a living space, or a life, either, for that matter.

Everything was clean and crisp, yet warm and even whimsical. It’s a place where you can dream of starting over. Or starting something new. Or just plain starting.

Details, baby… The details matter.

Touches of humanity and humor are critical in both a living space and a life, so getting them right is important. The goal for both is no clutter, yet something rich in personality and the intention to enjoy the ride.

These are some keys. They are Florida keys.

Get it?

Everywhere you looked, the message was, “Take a moment and appreciate the color, texture, and thoughtful design of this small space that you’re living in, right now.”

Make your inside align with your outside. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In either case, inside/outside harmony is important.

Let yourself be distracted by apparently unrelated input and stimulus. This is an important ingredient in productive creativity: making connections between previously unconnected ideas.

Innovative re-use of previously cherished concepts, passions, lessons learned, and parasols help define a new space…

… and new ways of dressing up functional necessities make the whole thing fresh and full of life.

Be where you are…

… and love those you’re with in the best way you know how.

Bring the old worth keeping into the new worth creating…

… and take delight in the unexpected explosions of light that splash into previously under-appreciated corners.

We woke up to this little ray of “Hi!-How-are-ya?!” every morning we were there.

Don’t be afraid of the wildlife you encounter along the way. Most of the time, it’s pretty innocent and often wildly entertaining.

I was surprised to learn that these little critters can hop up stairs.

These, on the other hand, didn’t hop anywhere because they’re ceramic or concrete or plasticine or something. Dana put them there, just for fun. I didn’t even notice them until the day we were leaving.
Another lesson learned: keep your eyes peeled along the way. There is always more to take delight in than you initially think.

Finally, when setting a new direction for your life, wear orange and flounce like you mean it.

Thanks, Rick and Dana.

Rick’s Music on iTunes

Rick just got a royalty check for $51.04.

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Here’s the breakdown:

$0.09 from Napster. $0.30 from eMusic. $0.12 from mediaNET. $0.07 from Rhapsody.

Just click on any of the CD covers here for samples of the secret sauce.

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Here come the big hitters: $12.74 through Apple iTunes. $4.64 through iTunes-Europe. The balance (too lazy to do the math) came from shrink-wrapped CDs sold through CDBaby.

Woo baby!! And I mean that in all sincerity.

Royalties are a very special category of income, worth much more than the amount deposited at the ATM.

They make you feel all glowy and noble and validated… like a king, even. Hey!… So that’s why they call them…

Never mind.

Royalties are concrete evidence that you’ve created art that is both original AND good. There are others, of course: hearing a young guitar player struggling to recreate your tune at a music jam, or watching little kids dance to your toe-tapper in an open air concert, or hearing grown men sniff back tears at your touching lyrics. In a world where people tend to measure value and success in dollars, such moments are priceless — and probably why it seems perfectly reasonable to tilt at windmills.

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An original song, a blog post, a cartoon, a book, a photo… finding and giving voice to an idea is like bearing children: it can be an exhausting, frustrating, incredibly fulfilling and often under-appreciated labor of love that leaves huge stretch marks.

As for Rick’s music, it’s all here…

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Enjoy!

No Sad Songs

This seems like as good a time as any to explain where L’il Duck came from.

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He’s the punchline to my Dad’s favorite G-rated joke. Here’s the joke:

Funny Man asks: “Why do little ducks walk so softly?”

Obliging Straight Man answers: “I don’t know. Why DO little ducks walk so softly?”

Funny Man responds: “Because little ducks can’t walk, hardly.”

And by the way, you’d walk funny too if you had one foot that was a square and the other was a triangle. Kind of throws off your rhythm, ya know? I think Rick may have been sick at home with a terrible cold the day they covered how to draw bird feet at Cartoon School.

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He also apparently missed a few biology classes along the way. That is most definitely not a duck’s beak, and since when are ducks yellow? He looks more like the runt of a pterodactyl litter than anything that would be served “a l’orange.” But I can’t squawk too loudly on this one.

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In the first place, L’il Duck plays an incredibly important role in our cartoon world. He’s most often the voice of reason, the state-er of the obvious, the keen observer of what’s really shaking in any given situation. Plus, he’s consistently drawn, even if he’s somewhat inexplicably conceived of, and he’s cuter ‘n a baby buffalo.

How fabulous is it that Rick took a character that I’ve know since I was old enough to mangle a joke and brought him into living, breathing, and chatty color on the pages of our shared life journal?

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He’s the icon, in our world at least, of delightful word play and intelligent fun. We love him dearly and won’t abide one word of ridicule about his beak, color, or pointy little triangle feet, ya hear?

Learning To Play

It seems easy enough when you watch other people do it.

One just casually places the soft pads of one’s fingertips gently on the sweet spots on the neck. The other hand strums and plucks with confidence. Steel laughs and hums into the wooden cave, and then the miracle happens: beautiful ballads, haunting love songs, and soft pink lullabies waft forth.
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Not.

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The reality is that learning how to play my upright bass activates myriad uncharted neuropathways, all clamoring for personal and immediate attention. What note am I supposed to be playing? What string do I need to find, with both hands committed to completely different tasks? The tender tip of my finger needs to press the thick steel string on to the neck at precisely the right spot, and hit it HARD.

I am to ignore the pain.

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Simultaneously, my right hand has its own assignment: damp the previous note, find and play the new one. All this while my short-term memory gropes for the words, and my ears, lungs, and vocal cords strain to croon like Diana Krall, with the whole thing on pitch and in perfect time.

I know it’s possible. I just don’t know if it’s possible without peeing my pants.

I’m seeing glimmers of hope, though. I played a whole song without an error yesterday. (Okay, there are only 2 open-string notes in the bass line of “Sally Goodin,” so technically, you could do it on a set of well-tuned drums, but still….) I can play both the C and G scales in both directions. I figured out both “Frere Jacques” and “Doh! A Deer” by ear.

Rick and I even wrote a song together: Silent Angels. We’re going to perform it, as well as ten other songs, at a Rett Syndrome benefit concert in Teton Valley.

In front of many attentive people.

Just the two of us.

With nowhere to hide.

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Excuse me. Gotta pull on the Depends and practice now.