Hi-Hat Solos

I've tried to be flexible about this economic downturn stuff. First I had to lasso my pissed-off feelings against Wall Street financiers, Capitalists, and generally anyone who had more money than I, or at least a better haircut. Then I lost my job and tried to substitute my previous activities into porn sites, books on Japanese bondage, and after some excruciatingly dull "alone time," began this blog.

Unemployment insurance was a great help and though rather paltry when compared to my actual bills, I carried on until I spent my entire allottment. Luckily, the state government (which is also broke) instituted an extension of funds for a few more months which is keeping me in tortillas and Trader Joe's frijoles. I sold some old SLR cameras and lenses which I no longer used, but in a digital world no-one was was interested in paying much for film cameras. I used the money on a decent seat at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and watched a performance of Wagner's Die Valkyrie. It was good, but about 3 hours too long. I'm used to movies being too long, but it's usually a matter of thirty minutes of over-indulgence on the director's part. Watching a Germanic blow hard musically masturbate for 6 hours is tantamount to water-boarding no matter how amazing the performance. I must admit, however, the singing and orchestration was certainly thrilling, though actual wars have been started, fought and concluded in less than 6 hours.

Anyhow, the cameras are gone. I also cashed-in my only attempt at "saving for quality retirement" as the bank's advertisement referred to it: a $5,000 dollar I.R.A. account, which had been advised by my tax accountant about 3 years ago. The tax mess will get thornier this year, much thornier. I'm planning to begin a religious conversion to deal with it, but I'll hold off until the end of the fiscal year.

So, eventually I decided to rent-out a room in my apartment. Though my place is technically a one-bedroom abode, there is a small ante room which could be referred to as an office. I call it my music room, with floor to ceiling books, vinyl, cd's, cassettes, vhs tapes and dvd's. Near the room's only window sits a bad replica of an Eames chair in sky blue naugahyde which includes a matching foot rest with a missing metallic stand which I prop atop a box of books left unopened since moving into the place 8 years ago. I know it's not much of a room to offer, but there's space for a small bed, and I didn't ask much rent in return either. I just needed a few hundred dollars to help defer my end-of-month rental commitment. Hell, I've lived in tents, cars, boats and everyday I see homeless people in my neighborhood who call a slab of sidewalk pavement home. Times are tough.


Sometimes to comfort myself, I rent movies which were shot inside the Iron Curtain. Made in the 1950's through the 1980's, these films provide a backdrop of gray, spiritually bankrupt locales--any example of which Kenneth Tynan might have referred to as a "fetid yawn of a city." LOVES OF A BLONDE by Milos Forman would be an example. The musician love-interest lives with his bickering parents in a cramped apartment in Prague, his bed pushed against the wall in the common dining room/living room. Upon the arrival of a one-night stand girl from the provinces who expects to stay with him, the household is cramped even further with the musician joining his parents in their bed, allowing the girl to commandeer his sleeping space just beyond the square table and chairs used for meals. It's a story of love however, not one of deprivation. What I, at the time of my first viewing, saw as poverty has visited me 30 years later. I'm not alone in the decaying home of the brave, but this isn't the time for my usual diatribe on class war.

I rented the room to the first one who called me to look at it, a Chinese guy in his 20's whose parents live in Seattle and who has a job in a skateboard shop in Hollywood. The guy is quiet, he rarely talks to me and if he receives a call on his cell phone, he quickly takes it outdoors for privacy. He has hardly any possessions and rides his skateboard for transportation. He has told me his name on a few occasions, but I'm bad with names and I couldn't understand him very well, so for the time being I refer to him in the universal appellation of "dude."

He was with me about 2 weeks when he brought home a high-hat--one of those sets of cymbals that drummers use, mounted on a stand with a pedal that clamps the brass plates together or modulates the tone. Players also use drum sticks on them for individual effects to compliment the percussive architecture of all those drums one sees behind the guitars in a rock band. "Dude" graciously doesn't seem to play drums, but his use of the high-hat is quite enough. I'm not someone who can say if he's good or not, mostly it sounds like unique noise. But I can say that its influence on my apartment is not agreeable. Not by a long shot. I can't read, watch television, listen to the Lakers game, check my email, or shuffle through porn web sites without the steady sound of his ringing brass prosthetic of noise. It makes the extra few hundred dollars a moot point when I consider the cost of therapy that may become involved.

I've never understood people who allowed their dogs to bark uninterrupted all through the day and night, or parents who don't seem to notice that their child is screaming and has been screaming the entire time they've been in line at the bank or grocery store. I understand having a problem and not knowing how to resolve it, but these people seem to have trained themselves to neglect that there ever is a problem: the 3 Akitas with mouths tortured in snarling and fierce attack are silent to them, though everyone else on the block is imprisoned in their houses with the windows closed, their earplugs in place, humming the Star Trek Theme to counter the dogs' incessant barking. Obviously the examples are many. It gives modern living a bad name.

Anyhow, I've been tempted to ask "dude" to leave, refund the rent money he hasn't yet given to me and call it a noble failure in a communal experiment. But that seems too cold somehow. Instead, I've dragged out my digital camera and recorded him playing. I hope to put it on YouTube and instigate some interest in his talents from a local homeowner that may have living quarters more compatible with his musical expressions. A music fan with an empty garage would fit the bill, someone with a soundproof basement or maybe one of those people who own ugly mansions in the suburbs so large that the sound from one bedroom doesn't carry the football field length of distance between it and the next habitable room. Anywhere but here.



It's a little like having adopted a pet from an Animal Shelter with all the self-congratulatory pride one accumulates at those times, only to realize later that it urinates all over your bedspread at every opportunity and is incorrigible in it's rebuke at contradictory training. There are over 6 billion people on this planet certainly someone likes pets enough to ignore the stench and wet bedding involved in caretaking this pet. But who? And where to find them?

This video I've attached is my advertisement to anyone who would like to amass enough good Karma to build a backfield of Buddhas. Like the music? He can be yours. Name's "Dude." Just give me a call.

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