Mind Like a Steel Trapper Keeper
Chris is totally confused
It’s the first parent-teacher conference of any given school year, circa 1986-1989:
“Chris is totally confused.”
He did alright for a few weeks. He seemed to be learning and was clearly trying. But things had gone quickly downhill. His teacher tried to help, but Chris was just too overwhelmed to focus. He seemed paralyzed.
This wasn’t a crisis, and his mother knew exactly what to do: she sat him down with all his accumulated loose papers and notebooks. They emptied out his Trapper Keeper, which was still in the Mead corporation’s default layout.
“Let’s get this thing organized, and then see how you feel.”
They looked at one paper at a time, put everything into categories, and make a tidy new system where each item had its place. They made lists of what to review, a schedule for doing it, and a little system for keeping track of new homework. The brain fog lifted.
Chris was never a star student, but he was back on track, stopped getting tummy aches, and started smiling again:
It’s the first day of any Alarm Will Sound production from any given year, circa 2009-2018:
“Chris is totally confused”
He’s just standing there, staring at piles of loose drums and folded-up hardware. Chris had his whole world pre-planned on paper, but now he’s here and the gear is strange and unfamiliar. The room is smaller than he imagined, and a weird shape. There isn’t enough time. He could just start putting stands together, but he’s paralyzed.
The production team, bless their hearts, are always there for him. “How can we help,” they ask, with a tone of gentle but appropriate urgency — they need the percussion set now in order to do anything else. In his best moments, Chris apologizes for being overwhelmed… for not knowing what to tell them. In less centered moments he… I… bite the hand that feeds me. Leave me alone.
This isn’t a crisis. I know exactly what to do: I look at the setup drawings I meticulously planned in advance, and let them go. I put one thing roughly in place, and then another. I make a little plan for just the first piece we’ll be rehearsing. I make a little place for items I’m not sure what to do with yet (over there, out of sight). I slowly make my little world.
First rehearsal goes okay. I get through it. I apologize to JV for being bitchy. By the end of day two, I’ve got a little system for each piece. Matt’s got his world looking real nice, too. The brain fog lifts. I look forward to coming to rehearsal again. The smile returns.
“Also, Chris isn’t wearing his glasses.”
A Binder for Music and Math and Feelings
Alarm Will Sound is at the University of Missouri this week recording and performing a whole bunch of very complicated rep: Oscar Bettison’s Livre des Sauvages and Pale Icons of Night, my Hanabi, and experimental tech-forward work by Brittany J. Green and Nnux. It’s a lot! But each of our little worlds are starting to make sense.
I planned a week off from writing because I knew I’d be busy. But that failed, clearly… here I am emailing my elementary school photos to two hundred smart and attractive people.
After forty weeks, I realized there are enough posts (and loose papers and cymbal stands) accumulated to start organizing the Music and Math and Feelings binder. I wanted to take advantage of a nice moment where there is finally enough there to really step back and see how it all fits together.
Let’s just say I went pretty deep with that exercise (yup, there’s a spreadsheet), and I’ll spare you… but it did produce one useful thing I’d like to share — below is a little collection of the posts I’m most proud of, categorized. This will continuously evolve, and become my “start here” tab on the homepage.
Hopefully if you recently subscribed or want to play catch-up but don’t want to wade through everything, there will be a couple posts that you might enjoy.
Edit: The list I posted here did indeed become the “start here” tab on my front page, so I’ll just direct you to that page, which will continue to be a living document. Enjoy!
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