Little Monsters of the Soul

So I go out to my favorite gig: once a month I do the Glendale Community College Swap Meet. I'm the only musician they've had for the last year and a half. I set up at the top of the parking lot by the food truck and I play for three and a half hours. The vendors and I am friends. They applaud. Some of them make sure I have enough tips to make me want to come back. The sound is amazing: it echos off the the parking structure at the bottom of the lot so it surrounds and get you lost. It's the closest I may ever get to Carnegie Hall for sound. Anyway, I'm jazzed. I'm going to give it my all this Sunday. About a half an hour into it this little Irish man with a thick brogue comes up and says something and I couldn't make it out what he was saying and so I ask him to repeat it. He says "Can you give us a break. Stop?" I say what? "Can you take a break? Give us a break?" I say "How rude," I look at him and say "I'm not stopping. Go away." I didn't really realize, that the conversation had been mic'd to the entire place. Anyway, he wanders off. I have no idea if he is a vendor or just a customer or the music critic for the LA Times, but I'll be damned if he's going to fuck with my day. It turned out the be the best day I've had for tips out there. A lady videoed me for her banjo playing boyfriend. Several parents sent their little kids over to give money. The manager of the Swap Meet wandered by and I told him what a great day it was and he agreed. (The little Irish guy had spoken to him or not and it didn't matter.) Somebody, I don't know who, flipped a twenty into my banjo case. I'm beginning to believe that your day won't be blessed unless you have one of these these little trolls appear early and curse you in their sad little manner before you really get to put your soul out there.

On The Street

The 2017 album cover (photo by Todd Felderstein) And the first cut:

If You See Her

Soloing

Spent the week practicing a solo I'm recording on Saturday. This was what I was suppose to be doing in high school. (Lenny Kravitz above - in high school)

What I did this last year

6389 miles and 102 gigs! And earned enough to make a CD!

Fermor's Books

This is a unbelievably beautiful book! I had found the second volume in a thrift store and was captivated by the cover art and the buzz I found. I asked for the other two volumes for Christmas. Ranks up there with Turgenev's "A Sportman's Journal" and John Muir's "Yosemite"

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.[8] He set off on 8 December 1933, less than a year after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. A book on the final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but was published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and on an early draft he wrote in the 1960s