I have a new idol – incidentally yet another good thing thrown my way by Naxos Loon: Ben Lewis. I sort of knew of him before, but, thanks to the ape, the last few days I have been living and breathing Ben Lewis.

His documentary ‘The Great Contemporary Art Bubble’, which is how I had vaguely heard of him previously, is still outside my reach, outside of a tiny trailer on youtube that is. He is selling it on his website as a DVD and I will probably be trundling over there to order my copy as soon as I am done posting this. I have watched one of his Art Safari films just now, this one about Takashi Murakami.

Superflat? I’ll say it is… So, apparently, the Japanese became superflat because they got zapped by the A-bomb. That’s what they claim in there. What happened to the rest of humanity then, I wonder?

Nothing more to add. Ben Lewis speaks straight out of my heart!

If you talk about a musician who is special to you, are you (in the end) (again!) talking about yourself? Well, yes. I suppose you are. But, no matter – I do want to talk about Bob Dorough, for whose music I placed a big order at Amazon last week. Apparently they manufacture one of the items I wanted only on demand, so I am still waiting for the whole shipment to arrive; but this is my Syncretismas gift to myself this year. You can listen to the samples if you are not familiar with the man’s music here.

I had not thought of Bob Dorough or listened to him in a very long time. I used to have his stuff on audio cassettes. Then when that technology became extinct I tossed out the whole kit and caboodle which I had accumulated during one of my major clean out sessions some years back and Bob Dorough’s music went out with the rest. And then lately I started hearing his songs in my head. Why I hadn’t done so in so long I have no idea. Anyway, the real music should be arriving in a few weeks and I cannot wait!

For someone who adores The Who, Bob Dorough may appear to be a somewhat bizarre choice but nevertheless I love his music – and I love Bob Dorough. He does “vocalese”, which means he adds lyrics to jazz standards that are essentially conceived of as instrumental music. And then he also sings quite a few regular jazz standards that others have in their repertoire as well. Like Polkadots and moonbeams, after which I named a whole alpha.tribe outfit. I do not really care for any of the other versions of this song sung by other vocalists, but his I love!

And much the same also goes for Devil may care and even Midnight sun (although admittedly Sarah Vaughn does a pretty mean Midnight sun as well).

He sings almost like as if he is talking, even maybe whispering. And yet there is still the melody. But he sort of teeters on the edge of melody, doesn’t seem to make a big deal out of it almost and yet it pours out perfectly of course. Off the cuff he is. Naughty. Mischievous. The voice of the refusal to grow up. Sticking to your guns of childhood as you plod through your boring old grown up life. And it carries both the joy and the sadness embedded into that state of being, which would inevitably bring with it humor and idiosyncrasies. And somehow Bob Dorough sings all of this, brings his psyche through in his vocals: Very tongue-in-cheek, very mercurial, very tough to pin down. Almost impossible to categorize, almost impossible to put a label onto.

Like I said – I love Bob Dorough. I love the music itself  of course, it is awesome. But I do more than just love the music in Bob Dorough’s case. I hear the one who sings it and love what the voice tells me of its owner

I just rooted around online a bit and Bob Dorough is alive and well at the age of 87. He has a page on my-space and I am almost tempted to sign up and become his friend there. Bloody shyness stopping me of course. In any case, although it is extremely unlikely that he will ever hear me doing so, I wish him all the very best of health and longevity and good spirits in the upcoming decade!

And!!! Major discovery: I have been desperately trying to find one of his albums which he recorded together with Bill Takas called Beginning to see the light in 1976, particularly for the track called Better than anything, the lyrics of which can make me chuckle on even the lousiest of days – but really the whole thing from one end to the other. I was willing to pay whatever anyone was asking for it but it seems to be extinct. And then voila! Here it is! What a find! What a blog! What generosity! YAYYY! Thank you Cat and LauraDoe!

“Let me conquer
My own jealousy that prevent me from seeing others talent and partake in their joy.

My own greediness that always turns me into the false protagonist of the day’s epic.

My own bourgeois moralistic mind that wants to shoot lines towards other opinions

And let me not put me or my as the first word in a sentence

And if you should see me loose this battle today, do not feed the enemy Myself.”

…

This is from Frigg Ragu’s Flickr. She wrote it today. And reading it has compelled me to write this post. I was going to write her a Flickr testimonial, but what I will do instead is link this post to there.

Anyone less in need of this prayer than Frigg I cannot imagine. And how do I know this? I recently told Frigg something that had to do with me. Not SL stuff, a personal matter in RL. Now, women (and forgive me for being sexist here, I am one myself after all) at least in my limited experience, can be master underminers. And it has nothing to do with how much they like or dislike you, whether they are your friend or not. Usually it is very subtle, hardly noticable. But more often than not, I tend to end up feeling shortchanged whenever I tell a woman of something that shows a certain strength that I might have. I leave with an uncertainty. No affirmation anyway. Not that what I told Frigg is really a strength as such. It involves a long and quite difficult to understand set of interrelated occurrences with a lot of sub-text which seems to somehow revolve around me. It would take a very subtle mind to “get” the thing even. Frigg has it. She has a subtle mind. And, more importantly, she is also generous. So, not only did she “get” what I was trying to tell her, but she also did not do the usual thing which I have encountered all too often in similar exchanges: The “oh, you are probably imagining it all…”, “it is all in your head…”, “you know, that happens to everyone…”,  “oh, that is just a coincidence…” … The subtext there being: “You are just an overly imaginative old cow, who is trying to make herself interesting by telling me a loonytoones story and then I am supposed to believe that?”. *(very subtle) snort?*…

I have yet to see Frigg turn herself into the protagonist of the day’s epic. In fact, if anything, she is a master listener. I have yet to hear her voice even one single bourgeois (or otherwise) pontification. And I have never ever seen her manifest jealousy and much less greed. She is a storyteller, someone of a depth of perception and an understanding of narrative sufficient to turn SL avatar poses into “expressive artifacts”.

How well do I know her? I first started noticing her on Flickr, through her comments and then became friends with her in-world late last summer. In SL, Frigg is the only person that I talk to everyday. We correspond via email also. I have collaborated with her on an intricate project over several weeks, with not even a single awkward moment anywhere along the way. No, I do not know her in RL and I am really hoping that I will some day. I do know that there she is very beautiful – which may account for the self-assurance which, as far as I can make out, seems to me the sine-qua-non of generosity. Not that all good looking women are self-assured to the point where they can also be generous but somehow in Frigg’s RL face there seems to be a strength and a clarity (which actually account for her looks) that I feel is important.

I am very very very glad that she is around…

…

Addendum: Of course what I said about women is a generalization and there are plenty around like Frigg herself who are nowhere near being emotional scrooges. My lovely friend Dina (who occasionally comments here as Ephemeral Emerald) is one such, for sure. And I know of others as well. Obviously. But, without generalizations there would be no statistical data, without which we would have no science – so, by and and large and exceptions notwithstanding, I am sticking to my guns, I’m afraid…
;-)

OK, enough of all the melodrama such as the unexpected alchemical side effects of unrequited love, the merits of middle age versus youth – and all the rest of that malarkey! Time to talk about some really important stuff – such as friends and friendship, which brings me to a currently absent friend, wolfgeng Hienrichs. (Incidentally, I think that I am probably the only one around who has the bloody cheek to call wolfgeng “wolfie” or sometimes even “wolfiekiens”; but to his credit, he does seem to tolerate this with high good nature. Everyone else calls him wolfgeng or wolf – as would indeed be quite appropriate!)

wolfie’s human is off in Greece somewhere fixing a leaky roof at the moment. I do wish the blasted thing would fix itself and wolfie would hurry up and come back home where he belongs. The metaverse isn’t quite the same without his little black snout in evidence.

It took me some time to befriend wolfie. Truth is I was intimidated by him. (Those horrible boyzz will not believe me when I say this, but I am actually quite shy). So, I would watch his tall dark figure from a distance, thinking to myself that there was something quite regal and sort of military about his demeanor. At some point wolfie asked me to come along while he was talking to a potential tenant for some Klein land. Quite needless to say I was highly flattered by the fact that he seemed to value my opinion on the matter and rushed over, falling over my own boots as I went, so to speak. From that point onward we were friends.

wolfie is the creator, owner and director of the Search and Rescue operations of Second Life, headquartered at Klein, our home sim. I will be writing separately and at length about S+R, for now suffice it to say that the regal and military bearing has a lot to do with this important mission/position in life, to which wolfie rises with aplomb and dignity.

wolfie is very funny, in fact he is quite pricelessly so. There are so many incidents where wolfie had me in stitches that it would be impossible to remember them all. The one that sticks in my mind right now, since it is quite recent, is the little conversation we had about his car: During the early days of Syncretia I stumbled upon what I thought was as a terrible accident: A car had fallen down a flight of stairs into the whale basin! These being indeed the early days of Syncretia I immediately cleared what I thought was the sad remainder of that evil day. However, as time went by I really began to cherish all the debris that the crashes and accidents caused, as well as all the parked vehicles and even (or indeed especially all the bombs and land mines) at Syncretia. So, I have been making a point of keeping them right where they are (the only exception being a spaceship I returned to Hack just last week – he had left it in the middle of the sky and the bloody thing had a couple of hundred prims to it. So, obviously no parking or accident – just a forgetful avatar, getting off a spaceship midflight and promptly forgetting all about it)… Anyway, back to wolfie’s car: So, the car was the only accident debris that I had ever deleted and the other day I asked wolfie if he could please do a simulation of it and put it back there. 

Well!!! O Boy o boy o boy!!! Did he flip out or what???!!! Was I completely mental? I had done whatttttt???? I had deleted the car? That had not been an accident for pete’s sakes!!! Did I not have eyes in my head? He had PARKED the car!!!! Could I not tell an accident from a parked car? That was a brand new car too!!!!… and meanwhile me piping in – “yes yes, but surely we can somehow sort this out wolfiekiens, come to some kind of amicable solution?”… “sort it??? sort it??? Amicable solution???? Go, speak to my insurance guy Alpha! But I can tell you right now it will be gross!!!“

Oh, and of course: How funny is wolfie? He is this funny:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgeng/2442449025/

wolfie is not only an officer, he is also a gentleman: For instance, there was this one little episode where I traumatized the living daylights out of him with my black ocelot skin:

A lesser man would have thrown up into his flight helmet right then and there. Not our wolfie – “oh, very cool Alpha” he said, meanwhile heroicallly managing to hold in his stomach contents no doubt… And of course another evidence of gentlemanly behavior would be his wonderful piano playing, in full tuxedo:

Not only is wolfie an officer and a gentleman, he is also a true friend: He calls me “alph” sometimes, which I totally totally love. Reminds me of Alf. But… it is the diminutive address that just about chokes me up with gratitude: I think wolfie is the only person that has ever addressed me in the diminutive and it gives me a good feeling that is almost pathetic in its intensity.

So wolfie baby… Time to come back home I think! Klein is quite deserted without you; not to mention the fact that Hack is in a god awful mood these days (he really is acting up something terrible you know) and I am pretty sure that at least some of it is due to the absence of your steadying influence!