Tag: gigs

Bologna

The Portly Politico5 Comments

The long national nightmare is over.  No, not the impeachment farce; it’s the end of the semester!  Grades are in the books, work is done, and teachers and students are heading out for two weeks of glorious Christmas Break.

It’s been an eventful week.  As the House was fulminating about Trump’s alleged “crimes,” I was playing a gig with our community jazz band.  I play second alto sax with the group, but I asked to sing a song on this concert.

It’s long been a dream of mine to sing with a full jazz swing band behind me, and that dream came true Wednesday evening.  I sang Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and was a nervous wreck (if you’ve seen the lyrics to that tune, you’ll understand why—what a mouthful!).  But I got through it admirably enough, even with a low-grade sinus infection.

The gig was during the dinner hour at a large church in town.  The first alto player indicated how hungry he was, and wondered if he could get a plate.  I told him (unhelpfully) that I’d eaten a bologna sandwich in my car before coming in (which sounds like a joke and/or the most mundane, pathetic detail in the world, but it was true).  All the old guys in the band—it’s a swing band, so there are a lot of them—expressed their enthusiasm for bologna sandwiches, and asked how it was prepared:  did I use mustard?  “Nope, Duke’s mayonnaise, with cheese.”  Murmurs of approval followed.

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O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Somewhere—I think it was in one of the Civilization games, but I can’t seem to find the exact quotation—I heard a pithy saying, something along the lines of “Genius is a combination of pressure and time.”  It’s one of those expressions that instantly rings true.

Years ago, a coffee shop in a nearby town (it’s now become a hip, upscale dining spot—and it axed the live music) used to host a quirky songwriting competition.  The premise was simple—every month, participants would pay $5 entry fee into a pot, and a “secret judge” would pick a winner, who would win that evening’s pot.  Sometimes there would be a small “second round” of the top three contenders for that evening (I won once, back in January 2014, when I believe I debuted “Greek Fair“; I was surprised, but also thankful that I wouldn’t spend $5 a month for the rest of the year).

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Joy to the World

The Portly Politico12 Comments

The musical mood continues here at The Portly Politico—as does the joy (check out my “Joy of” posts here, here, and here).  The Christmas season always lifts my spirits, and the boost from my piece on Milo and Romantic music has further buoyed them (if you’d like to elevate my mood to transcendent heights, consider purchasing some of my music).

With yesterday’s post on Christmas carols, I thought it might be interesting to look deeper into the most joyous of them all:  Isaac Watts‘s “Joy to the World.”

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The Joy of Christmas Carols

The Portly Politico15 Comments

Christmas puts me in a musical mood. For one, I’m somewhat contractually-obligated to put on a Christmas concert, which will consume most of my free time this week, so I’d better embrace the Christmas spirit—or else. But it’s not hard to get excited about the iconic music of the season.

(Also, Milo Yiannopoulos—the actual Milo—shared my post about his views on Romantic music, which helped make it the most trafficked post of the year so far. That was incredibly gracious of him to do, and it’s further boosted my excitement for playing and writing about music.)

As I wrote in an earlier blog post on hymnals, I’ve gradually taken over piano playing at my little Free Will Baptist church. We sing many of the traditional hymns that were written and popularized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as some earlier selections. Shape-note hymns are often hard to play, with big intervalic leaps in the melodies and surprisingly complex harmonies.

Take that melodic variety and harmonic complexity and multiply it by a factor of ten, and you’ve got Christmas carols.

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Cyber Monday Musings

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Today’s post is a glorified sales pitch.  ‘Tis the season, after all.  If you want to get to the punchline, head over to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1/month to unlock all of my SubscribeStar Saturday posts.  For $5/month, you get fresh doodles every Sunday, as well as other random bonuses.  The most recent $5 post included an MP3 of an original composition from Electrock Retrospective, Volume I: Dance Party.  More goodies to come!

Well, the glorious Thanksgiving Week is over.  The blog Didact’s Reach opened today’s post with the observation that this Monday is “doubly terrible”—after four or five days of heavy eating, sleeping, and shopping, nobody wants to be back at the grind.

This morning officially kicks off the busiest two weeks of the school year for yours portly:  a middle school drama production gets into tech rehearsals (and opens) this week, and our big, over-the-top Christmas concert is ten school days away—yikes!  That’s why I call Thanksgiving “the eye of the storm”—the brief calm before the craziness of December hits.  As the tech guy and music teacher at my little school, it’s an unusually busy season.  My online course hits their exam this week, too, so those grades are coming due.

But that’s all tedium that will get done one way or the other.  As for today, it’s Cyber Monday!

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Gig Day III: Spooktacular

The Portly Politico9 Comments

It’s been a pretty wild week; by “wild,” I mean that I’ve spent most of my time during the day working, only to stay up too late playing Heroes of Hammerwatch ($11.99 on Steam), a grinding rogue-like, with my brother and friends.  Talk about burning the candles at both ends.  I also just finished grading a massive stack of quizzes—just in time for a massive stack of tests to rise in their place.

Grading papers is a bit like the mythical hydra in that regard—lop off a few heads, and dozens take their places.  It is easily my least favorite part of the teaching profession.

Regardless, the wild week is going to end on a spooktacular note:  tonight I’m dusting off the keyboard and, for the first time in a few months, playing one of my legendary (and legendarily poorly-attended) coffee shop concerts.

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Lazy Sunday XXI: Travel

The Portly Politico54 Comments

I don’t really like to travel, mainly because I prefer sitting on my own toilet and watching my own TV.  If you’ve seen one trendy downtown district, you’ve seen them all, and going to cool places overseas is expensive, time-consuming, disruptive, and dangerous.  Yes, I would liked to have visited London thirteen years ago (when my family took a ten-day trip all around Ireland), but now that it’s part of the Islamic caliphate, I’ll pass.  Same with Paris.  The United States is a big country, with plenty to see and do domestically.

That said, I keep the road hot, and enjoy the occasional excursion to points of interest near and far.  With my recent trip to Wilmington—and with summer rapidly drawing to a close—I thought I’d dedicate this belated Lazy Sunday to posts about travel.

  • “Gig Day II” – This post is super short, but it briefly chronicles my trip to The Juggling Gypsy Cafe a year ago.  At that point, I was living in a hotel because my old apartment had flooded.  Because of the flooding, the power supply for my Casio keyboard was kaput (though it miraculously began working again a couple of weeks later), and I had to borrow an incredible Korg SV-1 from a pianist friend.  I’d spent the day laying sod at school, a grueling, physically-demanding job.  Conditions were far less than ideal for a late night gig in a distant city, but it went pretty well.
  • “Put Your Money Where Your Poll Is” – This piece analyzes a 2018 Gallup poll, in which 16% of Americans said they wanted to leave the United States permanently.  The findings showed that young, Democratic-leaning women tended to be the least grateful to live in this great country, as Ilhan Omar and Squad have demonstrated.  I posed the question then:  “So, young radical feminists, why don’t you put your money where your poll is?  I’d wager less than 1% of those who indicated they want to leave will actually do so.”  If you don’t like it—by which I don’t mean, “If you love the country, but you want to fix some things,” but rather, “If you fundamentally hate what our country is and stands for”—then get the hell out.
  • “Mid-Atlantic Musings” – This SubscribeStar-exclusive post details my trip to New Jersey, Coney Island, and the New York City Aquarium.  It also features hilarious of a video of an otter spinning head-over-tail in circles for minutes on end, one of Nature’s many bizarre pranks.  But you’ve gotsta be a subscriber—for just $1 a month or more!—to read it.
  • “Wilmington Wanderings” – Another SubscribeStar-exclusive post, this one covers my trip two days ago to Wilmington for another gig at the Juggling Gypsy.  It’s a detailed account of my encounters with a friendly transgender bartender/photographer, as well as the seedy nightlife of aging hipsters.  It’s well worth a $1 subscription (heck, you can even cancel immediately after reading it!).

That’s it for this week.  Here’s to the last week of summer vacation!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Wilmington Wanderings

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

In yesterday’s post, I alluded to a gig in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the Juggling Gypsy Cafe.  It’s an artist-friendly venue that has the vibe of such places:  a shabby, dimly-lit interior, populated with colorful, post-ironic types (some young, some clinging to youth on the wrong side of 35), the walls plastered with flyers for obscure bands and pages from old comic books.  It’s the kind of place I used to play frequently in my twenties, when I still had the energy and drive to play for peanuts at 10:30 PM on a Wednesday night.

It was a fun trip there and back.  I met a transgender photographer working as a bartender.  I talked to a really passionate carpenter.  An old dude had personal conversations with me during my second set.  But if you want to hear the whole story, you’ve gotta subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more!

Check out my music at www.tjcookmusic.com.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Phone it in Friday III: Video Killed the Blogging Star

The Portly Politico3 Comments

I’m heading up to Wilmington, North Carolina tonight to play a gig.  I played the same joint exactly a year ago, while I was living in a sleazy motel after my old place was flooded.  If you’re in the area, come on by, or check out my tour dates.

Regardless, your daily chum will continue in the vein of last Friday’s post, but with even less loving care.  In essence, I’m going to let you watch two talented individuals say important, insightful things.

It’s the blogging equivalent of pulling out that old media cart at school.  Everyone gets excited when the usual windbag kicks back and that tiny CRT television gets rolled out, its blue screen promising an hour of a grainy VHS tape.

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Hustlin’: Minecraft Camp 2019

The Portly Politico12 Comments

The June slump has hit, as people are less interested in news and politics and going outside.  It’s been a gorgeous few days here in South Carolina.  I left the house Wednesday morning and it was cold.

For non-Southerners, allow me to explain:  here in the Deep South, our only true season is summer, which runs from late March through Thanksgiving.  I’ve seen people mow their lawns a week before Christmas.  If we’re lucky we get a mild summer.  After an oppressively muggy May, a morning in the low 60s is a blessed reprieve here in the Palmetto State.

But talking about the weather is probably why my numbers are down, so I’ll move on to another non-politics-related topic:  my penchant for hustlin’.  Readers know that I have a few gigs running at any time, including private music lessons, adjunct teaching, my History of Conservative Thought summer course, and playing shows.  I also paint classrooms and do sweaty manly maintenance work at my little school when I’m not molding minds.  And while it doesn’t pay anything yet, I’m hoping to get a few bucks for my writing.

But perhaps my favorite side gig is an annual tradition:  my school’s annual Minecraft Camp.  A former school administrator started the camp, and I’ve carried it on for some years now.

For the uninitiated, Minecraft is basically LEGOs in video game form.  The genius creation of programmer Markus Persson, the game places players in a massive sandbox world, with the objective being… anything!  There are no timers (other than a day and night cycle), no goals, and no ending.  Players generate a theoretically endless world from scratch, and proceed to build—craft—their way to civilization (or endless PVP battles).

Players can activate Creative Mode, which allows for endless flights of fancy, with access to every block and resource in the game, or they can play in Survival, which is exactly what it sounds like:  players hide from (or fight) monsters at night, hunt for or grow food, and have to keep their health up.

Minecraft has enjoyed ubiquity since its release in 2011—it’s the best-selling video game of all time—and when we started Minecraft Camp back in the day (I think it was summer 2013 or 2014, but I’m not sure), it was HUGE.  The game has inspired probably tens of thousands of mods, from simple additions like extra monsters or types of blocks, to total conversions that completely rebuild the game’s mechanics.

With the rise of Fortnite a year ago, the game seemed to wane in popularity, but it’s apparently enjoying a resurgence:  our camp was up to twelve Crafters from a low of about four or five last year.  It gets absolutely chaotic at times—like during our final camp PVP battle, and a hectic boss fight against a gigantic, camper-created Creeper named “Creeperzilla,” that saw kids shouting nearly at the top of their lungs with unabashed glee—but it’s also beautiful to see the creativity of young children.  I am constantly amazed to see what they create.

And, let’s face it, there are worse ways to make an extra buck than playing video games with a group of creative eight-to-thirteen-year olds.  It definitely beats raking up old pine straw and spraying Roundup on cracks in the parking lot.

You can check out our camp’s blog here:  https://tbcsminecraft.wordpress.com/