Last month a shared a snippet from an interview I did with one of my students. The interview was for a podcast my class produces. Due to some technical difficulties, we had to redo the interview, which delayed the episode.
Anyway, you can listen to the whole interview. You should subscribe to the podcast (Apple or Spotify or on the website). It’s pretty cool.
One of my students interviewed me, today. We talked about lots of stuff, including my crooked path through several different versions of "music major" when I was in college. I thought this little snippet was pretty good; every once in a while I say stuff that kind of impresses me :)
The full interview will be posted in my class's podcast feed in a week or two. Stay tuned :)
Instagram kind of baffles me. Actually, that’s not totally true. I understand the desire to share photos with people; that is a pretty easy thing to understand. What I think I don’t understand is how/why people use it for so many other things. It is a pretty terrible medium for sharing anything other than low-res photos, and yet …
Back when it was a hipster photography service, I could wrap my head around Instagram, but what is it now, really? The “Stories” feature is especially baffling.
I teach a couple of classes on the music industry. Among many things, we often talk about marketing, branding, and general “how-to-get-people-to-support-your-band” ideas. I am not an expert in this field, but I try to steer the conversations in directions I think will be fruitful.
My students have tried to help me understand the power of Instagram, and I wonder if I am just not wired right to “get it.” For example, so, so, so many bands have Instagram as their only “presence” on the internet, and this seems like a bad idea to me.
To summarize where my conversations seem to always go when I talk about this with my students:
Instagram is where all of the people are. If you want eyeballs on your “content,” you have to put it where the eyeballs already are.
So far, I understand this completely. I still wonder why all of the eyeballs are there, but I get the idea of “go where the people are.” But, here is where I tend to get lost:
I can’t listen to your band’s album on Instagram. I can’t buy concert tickets on Instagram. I can’t really do anything super useful, save “like” photos and (short) videos you’ve posted.
This isn’t bad in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with “engaging” fans in this way, I suppose. But, what I don’t really “get” is when a band’s only online presence is Instagram. Yes, this is where the “eyeballs” are, but if they can’t listen to your album, buy concert tickets, or really do anything else of use, it seems like a waste of energy to make this be your only online “presence.” In fact, of all of the “social networking” services, it seems to me like Instagram is the worst one for musicians. The simple fact that you have to use weird hacks and add-ons to post any links seems to be evidence that it’s not really a ver good site/service for doing anything it wasn’t specifically built to do (i.e. share low-resolution photos). This is a limitation, by design, of what Instagram can do, and therefore, a limitation in how it can be very useful for musicians.
My thoughts with all of this has always been something along the lines of:
Social networking sites should be a springboard to your own website. Social networking sites should be a gateway to a place you control.
Again, I am not any kind of music-marketing guru; I (very often) feel like I shouldn’t actually be teaching this class. I am very much open to having my mind changed on this. I don’t like feeling like some sort of luddite or fogey who just “doesn’t get it.” Like those pompous blowhards say, “… change my mind.”
The Spring 2021 semester started on Monday. Late last week, I suddenly started to feel kind of overwhelmed. This, before I had actually gone “back to work” or started any classes. Thus, it became rather apparent that the whole taking-two-French-classes-this-semester thing might be such a good thing. So, I dropped one of them (and worked out a reduced schedule, of sorts, with the professor for the other one).
Part of this is because I am also going to take classical bass lessons again this semester. The last time I had one of those was in 2004! I am half-excited and half-nervous.
Two years ago, I decided to take Conversational French 1 at Grossmont College. I came to that decision because my wife and I were going to Europe for the entire month of June 2019. At one point in my life I was “fluent” in French, enough so that I had a job speaking French on the phone. But, that was quite a long time ago, and I wanted to “refresh” my French-speaking abilities before we jetted off to Paris.
Now, two years later, I have decided to take Conversational French 2 and French 4! I have discovered that I really enjoy learning foreign languages. I think the language-learning process scratches a certain area of my brain that I can’t get to otherwise. About a year ago, I decided to teach myself Dutch.1 I want to continue to chip away at learning Dutch, but I decided what I really wanted was something more structured and something that would hold me a bit more accountable … thus, I decided to dive back in to a semi-advanced French class.
My teaching schedule is pretty light next semester (I am actually using some “banked” time just to meet my 100% load obligation), which means I should have a little more time and mental energy to dedicate to something like this. A big change I am hoping to make about everything is to spend more time doing things “for me.” This is one of them (even though I know taking a college class is not super high on many people’s “for me” lists).
***
I have this long shot hope of finding a job in Belgium or The Netherlands, or taking a sabbatical to live out there for six months or so. ↩︎
I find people’s compulsion to make a grand exit kind of comical, so I am hoping this doesn’t come across like that. But, the short version is this: I am going to step away from traditional social media for the foreseeable future. The longer version is something of an explanation of where I am in this process, an explanation I hope doesn’t come across like this image:
This has very little to do with Facebook’s recent move to close off Donald Trump’s access to the platform; I understand this is perfectly within Zuck, et al’s legal rights, and I support their decision to muzzle whomever they decide is causing too much trouble. Every “free market” argument I’ve ever had with dyed-in-the-wool conservatives has taught me that the “free market” should be allowed to do whatever it wants, including discriminate against anyone they want. This is a central feature to “free market capitalism,” not an unfortunate “bug.” (To be honest, I don’t buy all of the “the-free-market-is-always-the-solution” stuff I’ve learned from these folks … in fact, I don’t buy most of it. But, given that this is primarily the crowd we are having to counterbalance when they shout about First Amendment rights, censorship, etc. I think it’s important to speak their language, so to speak, when describing what’s been happening over the past few weeks.)
Like I said, this has almost nothing to do with any of Facebook/Twitter/Apple/Google/etc and their decisions to muzzle specific voices. I think they are right to do that. The fact that we’ve put ourselves in a position where so much power over “speech” lies in so few hands is something we need to examine and probably dismantle to a certain extent. At the very least, these massive conglomerates should be broken up and better regulated … but this is for a different discussion.
(This has more to do with Facebook, Twitter, etc. business model [private data mining] and the general societal cost they’ve shown over the last few years.)
What I am actually getting at, here is that I am trying to be more deliberate about several things, my use of social media included. To be all Marie Kondo-y about it; Facebook and Instagram do not spark any kind of joy for me … quite the opposite, in fact.
I have generally tried to use Facebook in a way that was positive, or at least a way that was not excessively negative. I have certainly not been free of resorting to what could be called judgmental snarky-ness, though, at times when I found everything exasperating and I had lost my patience with people (both individually and as a whole). But, the thing is, I have watched Facebook tear relationships to shreds. I have found myself feeling far more unkind things about people (both individually and as a group) than I am generally inclined to do.
Yes, of course Facebook was just a medium through which people were trying to communicate, but the semi-anonymous nature of the medium seems to bring out the absolute worst in many people (myself included at times). Ideas about individualism like to make everything individuals acting in a vacuum, but that’s not reality; we all live connected to one another and every action is related to those around us. When dealing with a worldwide social network, the “around us” part gets significantly bigger.
There are people I know much better in real life than I do on Facebook, people I generally like and with whom I generally “get along.” But, if I only knew them via Facebook, if the only thing I knew about them was the persona they put forward on Facebook, I would definitely not get along with them very well. (Of course, there may be people who would say this about me. I hate the thought, but it’s probably true.) Why do we do this? Why do so many of us act like total assholes when interacting in this strange online “community?” There is a quote in You’ve Got Mailwhere Joe Fox tells Kathleen Kelly that she shouldn’t take things so personally: “It’s not personal; it’s business.” he tells her. She later comes back back with a comment about how “if anything should start somewhere, it should start by being personal.” I think she is right. Everything should begin by being personal; everyone we talk to, everyone with whom we interact is first a person, a person living a life rich with complexities, confusions, triumphs, and tragedies quite a lot like our own. Somehow, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter strip that all away and make everyone and everything less than “personal.” I am definitely like Kathleen; stuff that was never meant to be “personal,” is to me. As a result, I think far too much about what every comment or every post might mean, most especially when it involves me or groups of which I am a member (be that “surfers,” “fathers,” “bald guys,” “Californians,” “people who drive Priuses,” “academics,” “former vegetarians” … whatever).
I am not placing all of the blame on Facebook, Twitter, etc. But, I am also not willing to give them some sort of free pass. These companies could have made the communities better; there are lots of things that could have, should have been done to make their platforms into something much less toxic. But, a fact remains that outrage = more eyeballs on the “content” which = $$ for these companies, so it wasn’t in their financial interest to build platforms which minimized outrage. And, like a bunch of people pretending not to look on curiously at the wreckage of a multi-car pile-up, we all gladly played into the outrage game.
I am also not willing to give the blowhards who have gone out of their way to be overly political, offensive, or otherwise extra-awful human beings any sort fo pass either. There are lots of people—I am still shocked at just how many—who seem to find personal energy out of pissing people off. Of course, talk radio set the stage for this, but the online version is something even nastier in some ways.1 I know some people like this who seem, “in real life,” to be relatively-normal folks, but online, they turn into monsters. Again, why?
But, there are some times when I have found Facebook useful. I have gotten (well-paying!) gigs through Facebook. I have had very meaningful, heartfelt discussions through Facebook. I have learned new ways of seeing the world through interactions on Facebook.2 Thus, I don’t really want to leave completely. But, I also recognize that my mental state is generally better when I stay away from things that make me upset, which so many things I see on Facebook have a tendency to do.
So, I am going to keep my Facebook account open, and will probably post links to events, new posts on my website (which I definitely want to do more), and various things I want to try to promote about my classes and the college. But, I am going to be a lot more deliberate about all of it.
Here is where I say, please, if you want to stay in touch with me, do so. Send me a message via email or through my website, or a text message, or via Signal, or whatever. I would like that. But, don’t expect me to be super responsive on Facebook/Instagram anymore.
***
As an aside: I have made a habit of specifically not watching any videos someone shares with words like “shreds,” “demolishes,” or “obliterates” in the title/description. Ditto for almost anything from Jeanine Pirro, Ben Shapiro, or Bill Maher (and lots of others); those folks are purposefully insensitive and overly-simplistic and want little more than to wound people. ↩︎
I don’t know if I have had any positive experiences with Twitter. I have had a few accounts over the years, but I never really felt like I was getting anything useful out of the platform … just a lot of out-of-context yelling and echoing. I am still trying to figure out why Instagram is so popular or what it is actual use-case is (which is a topic that needs its own post.) ↩︎
I am feeling the way this song sounds pretty hard right now:
The thing is, once I “stop,” stuff like this comes rushing to fore. I don’t like to think of myself as a ‘busy body,’ but it’s becoming pretty clear that I have built up ‘stuff to do’ as a coping mechanism for avoiding sometimes-crippling sadness. The things I use to keep myself ‘busy’ are mostly meaningless, banal things, things that I don’t actually even care about.
I am kind of obsessive about trying to keep things around me neat and tidy. As I was sweeping/mopping our floor last night, I was thinking about why I even cared about stuff like that … Why do I “need” the countertop to be clear? Why does seeing it a mess give me so much anxiety? … And, I think a lot of it comes down to wanting desperately to feel like I am in some sort of control of things. A messy countertop = more evidence that everything is out of control, and I am helpless. So, I take some comfort in having my desk clean; a clean desk = I am in control of some things and I can take solace in them.
I have sometimes described my experience as feeling claustrophobic inside my head. There are so, so, so many things zooming through my brain at any given time, thoughts about literally everything. The best analogy I can can think of is something similar to how I often feel in a crowded concert or airplane; I am not “scared,” per se, but am definitely a little nervous and uncomfortable with so much going on and so little “order” to all of it. There is a line in Björk’s song, “Hunter” that hits this pretty much exactly: “I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me.”
I have studied a lot about Buddhism and Taoism. In both of these traditions, there is a lot of talk about not trying to control things; things just are as they are, and trying to control them really only makes you miserable. I get this, philosophically, but in practical terms, I can’t imagine actually just “letting go” of certain things. This, especially when I feel like my “natural state” is just sad. (And, yes, I know that Buddhism would say I have some of this stuff backwards …)
Something else that hurts a lot: What the hell do I have to be so sad about? Objectively, virtually everything has turned out for me, I have “accomplished” more than I ever really set out to do … yet, sometimes I am just really, really sad.
Anyway, some days are worth being a little extra vulnerable, and today is one of them, I guess.
Yesterday, I posted a message both here and on Facebook. I knew it was a bit risky and controversial when I posted it. The fact is, just about anything can be risky or controversial in socialmediaville; this is just part of the nature of the landscape.
But, I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot of things over the past week. I think most people have been doing the same. (I hope they have been.) And, as I have been thinking about stuff I have read and seen, my head has gone in a lot of directions, one of those places was something like “Look at all of those hypocrites!” That wasn’t super helpful. I semi-regret what I said.
Actually, I don’t really regret what I said, but perhaps how I said it. I am alarmed at what the President has done, is doing. I am alarmed that certain “sides” of our society seem to simply not care. But, the framing I put around this alarm probably came across as more antagonistic than I intended.
Most of my comments were really meant for a pretty small (but loud) group of people. In trying to make my point, I swept others into the pile, which wasn’t my intention. I am still bothered by this particular group’s seeming nonchalance around the American President’s authoritarian tendencies. I am still a bit shocked to watch all of the 180s amongst this group. But, it was sloppy of me to through such a wide net.
I will admit I have my own behavioral/intellectual paradoxes. It would probably be pretty easy for someone, were they interested, to poke all sorts of holes in my way of seeing and interacting with the world. I am 95% positive someone could find a “gotcha” Facebook post from the past. So, I suppose it was a little unfair of me to try to call folks out.
All of us are biased; it is impossible not to be. Despite what some people might think, I do try to see around my built-in biases, I do try to read and listen widely. Still, none of us really know all that much, so we are left to a combination of trusting those that know more and piecing things together. I appreciate whatever patience you can afford while I try to do what I can.
The short version: To my “conservative” and Republican friends: your silence over the past week is saying quite a lot.
The longer version: I have a fair number of friends with whom I disagree on political matters. Some of them, vehemently so. I have learned which ones are actually open to respectful discussion and which are just looking to “own the libs” or otherwise act like smug know-it-alls. I’ve done some pruning of my Facebook friends list, mostly using the “unfollow” and “snooze for 30 days” features to keep my timeline within reasonable bounds. I am not looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t need vitriol and idiocy clogging up my headspace.
Over the past five days, I have been looking around for some of these folks to speak up. For me, the President has crossed hundreds of lines since January 2017; he crossed dozens (at least) before that. I get it that some people just aren’t bothered by these things. I don’t really understand how they aren’t, but … whatever.
Anyway, on Monday the President had the police forcibly remove almost entirely-peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park. There are multiple accounts—including video—of the fact that this was, indeed, a peaceful demonstration. Seemingly out of the blue, these protesters were met with tear gas and pepper balls, at the request of the US Attorney General.1
The President’s move on Monday should have every “conservative” very upset. The President shut down a peaceful assembly of people using the freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment. Conservatives know the Constitution well; for some, it is a sacred text. Yet, the President very obviously violated the first thing on the “things-the-government-can’t-do” list. This isn’t a difference of opinion. There is no other way to interpret what happened on Monday. There were peaceful protesters in DC; at the White House’s order, the DC police had them removed.
The President followed this with an awkward photo-op. Did the President really shoot at demonstrators in order to clear the way for a really bad photo?
So, I am here to ask my conservative and Republican friends: I have been checking in on your Facebook pages over the past week. I have been hoping to see something about what happened. I was instantly very upset by what happened on Monday, but I decided to give you all some time to catch up on the news and process what has been going on. Unfortunately, I have seen exactly zero (ZERO!) conservative/Republicans I know say anything about this. Supposedly, the First Amendment is really important to y’all. When various state governments said we couldn’t go to church out of caution around coronavirus, many of you said this was anathema to the US Constitution; this was taking away both the freedom of religion and the right to assemble, you said. Now, the President himself has taken violent action against people in the streets, and none (NONE!) of you have anything to say.
C’mon, guys. You can do better than this. I promise I won’t pull out the “I told you so” stuff. Please, just show me you actually care about right and wrong and the US Constitution as much as you claim to.
***
The White House wants the press to rescind its claims that the police used “tear gas.” They don’t deny using a military-grade chemical irritant … just not “tear gas.” ↩︎
Earlier, I mentioned that Amsterdam was my least favorite part of our trip. I already kind of regret saying that. But, here is a bit of a rundown.
What I didn’t like about Amsterdam:
Streets: I found it really hard to navigate. The “plan” for the city felt kind of haphazard to me. Among other things, it took quite a while for me to decipher the difference between a sidewalk/walking area, a bike lane, and a street. I remember walking out of the main train station and thinking, “Whoa! What is going on out here?”
This is both a sidewalk and a trolley car route.
Bikes: I love bicycles and cycling more than most, but the city is completely overwhelmed with people trying to get around on bikes, many of them (like me) without much knowledge of how the city “works,” so it feels really chaotic. There are bikes everywhere. I love this in the abstract; I would love to see more bikes used as a method of transportation here in the US, but throw a few thousand extra tourists into the mix, all of whom also want to ride a bike around your famously-bike-friendly city and it gets a little less wonderful. I can’t actually put my finger on exactly why I disliked the bikes in Amsterdam, save the feeling that I was kind of lost a lot of the time, and people zooming by on bikes all the time didn’t really help.1 In the end, I guess this is really the same complaint at the first: everything just felt really chaotic.
My beautiful wife, riding a bike in Vondelpark.
Marijuana: Cannabis has been legal in California, for both medicinal and recreational purposes, for some time now. I am not bothered by this at all. I would actually like to see some other “illicit” products made legal under at least some circumstances. What bugged me about the pot in Amsterdam is how ubiquitous it seemed to be. Put bluntly, the entire city just reeks of pot. I know that easy access to all sorts of usually-illegal stuff is part of Amsterdam’s “brand,” but I found the pot levels to be kind of over the top. Mostly, I think what bugged me is knowing that it’s not actual native Netherlanders in those shops doing all of the toking; mostly, it’s stupid American 20-somethings “exploring their horizons.” It seemed kind too “on the nose” for me, I guess.
The “Red Light District”: This is the same complaint as the one about pot. It’s not even really “a thing,” save that it’s there to put on a façade for tourists. I suppose San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury is kind of like this. Also, West Hollywood and the New Orleans’s French Quarter.
In hindsight, I would like to give The Netherlands another shot. I didn’t get to visit any other part of the country. My entire experience with the country was in its most (in)famous city and the tiny bit of the rest of the country I could see on the train ride from Brussels to Amsterdam. One Dutch woman I know saws that Amsterdam is her least favorite place to visit, and I think I can see why. Honestly, though, by the next morning, I was already feeling better about Amsterdam, so I wonder if I would have totally loved it after a week. At the very least, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht all deserve at least some attention.
The fact is, the longer we were in Amsterdam, the less it bothered me. Once we got ourselves some bikes and went for a ride through town and through the park, it was more fun. Once I wrapped my head around the street/bike path/trolley track/sidewalk situation, I felt better about all of it.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I am re-thinking my feelings about the Netherlands. It’s a nice country with this weird, quirky, almost comically clichéd town as its largest city. Imagine if Memphis was the only thing you saw from the US and you judged everything about the country based on that city … you’d definitely have a skewed view of what “America” is like.
My beautiful wife in front of Rijksmuseum.
In hopes of going back to Europe on a longer-term basis someday, I’ve been trying to learn to speak Dutch over the past nine months. I am really liking it. As I mentioned before, I am semi-seriously looking at moving to Belgium someday; half the country speaks Dutch.2 Obviously, learning to speak Dutch, no matter the reason, means I should go back to the Netherlands and give it all another try. I am already starting to make some plans … assuming the world goes back to something resembling normal someday.
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Once I rented a bike myself, things got better, actually. Thus, I suppose my dissatisfaction with the bikes in Amsterdam was not the bikes themselves, but with trying to get around not on a bike (i.e. walking) with so many other people on bikes (many of them halfway lost.) ↩︎
Technically, they speak a dialect called Flemish. It’s still “Dutch,” but has its own quirks … probably like the difference between the English they speak in Scotland vs. the Southern US. The other half speaks French. ↩︎
As a whole, I think Belgium was the place that surprised me the most. While I certainly never had anything against Belgium, it was never incredibly high on my places-I-want-to-see-someday list. I think it suffers from being right next to more popular countries like France, England, and Germany, and, as a result, gets left out of the someday-I’ll-visit-Europe plans for some people (myself included). It turns out, though, that Brussels was one of my favorite places we visited (and Belgium one of my favorite countries)!
I think Brussels benefitted from being the first city we visited on purpose (not just “traveling through” or slightly lost). At the very least, we weren’t exhausted, yet, which probably made Brussels impact us more and some of the later places impact us less.
The Grand Place is incredible. It is also kind of hard to find. It was on the to-do list for the day, but we actually found it by accident. We came out of a hallway, looking for a restroom,1 and then we were just there.
Mannekin Pis is really pretty dumb. Someone told me it would be underwhelming and they were right. Still, you kind of have to go see it.
Waffles in Belgium really are different than in the US. The “Belgian waffles” we get here in the states are quite different. In the states, a “Belgian waffle” is often a just a slightly crispy regular waffle (pressed with a bigger iron) topped with fruit. In Brussels, the waffles are closer to a pastry-like texture; some almost resemble raised donuts or croissants in their texture. Inside the waffles are small chunks of sugar that has caramelized under the heat. In general, people just eat them plain, wrapped in paper. They are delicious! I had a waffle at Jamba Juice that got pretty close, but I haven’t seen many others that really do it “right.” My wife actually bought some of special sugar crystals and brought them home. We tried our hand at making “real” Belgian waffles; they were pretty close, but not quite as good … my wife is a good cook, though.
What we all call “French fries” are really Belgian. They call them pommes frites [pum freet] (or just, frites). I am not a huge “fries guy,” but I did like the ones we had in Brussels. The Belgians cut the potatoes thicker than we do and the fries have a distinctively sweet flavor (maybe they use a sweeter oil for frying?). The fries are served in a paper cone with a tiny fork and a small cup of sauce. The place we went had a few choices of sauce, one of which was pretty awesome; it was called sauce samouraï. It’s kind os sweet and kind of spicy, and mostly pretty great.
This isn’t entirely unique to Belgium, but I found the way rural communities are set up to be really interesting. Essentially, even the small towns are quite densely populated. In the US, a rural community is often very spread out with “neighbors” living hundreds of yards apart. Often, a farmer will live on their farm, meaning their closest neighbor is far on the other side of many acres of crops. In Belgium (and other part of Europe), things were organized differently. There, people live right next to each other, even in small towns. The town of Meerbeek (population 2,188), where my wife knows some people, feels like a city; there are narrow streets, alleyways, and people living right next to, even on top of, one another. Belgian farmers don’t, it appears, live on their farms. When it is time for tending to the crops/livestock, the farmer rides or drives out to the fields to tend to things, then returns home (maybe miles away) when all is said and done. Among other things, this makes the smallness of the rural areas not seem so small. It also makes the community feel more like one. In many American small towns, especially in the West, people live pretty far apart, which makes this person-to-person connection harder to make. I wonder if rural life in the US would be different if we organized our communities this way.
There are a lot of bicycles in Belgium. In Leuven, one of the first cities we visited, kind of by accident actually, has huge portion of the city where bicycles are the only vehicles allowed on the streets.2 I like to think of myself as a bit of a “bike guy.” I used to ride quite a lot; I rode to/from work some three or four days a week for a few years. My family only had one car and having me ride to work was a way to both keep in shape and keep the costs of commuting down. I don’t ride nearly as often anymore, but I wish I did. It has gotten harder as my kids have gotten older and have to be lots of places.
We ended up in Leuven because we hadn’t yet figured out how to read the train schedules as they were listed in our EuroPass app versus how they were listed on the placards at the train stations. We rode a high-speed train directly from the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Brussels3. Then, we were supposed to meet a friend of my wife’s at a station called Erps-Kwerps (outside of Brussels). But, we ended up getting on a train that went by that station but didn’t stop there. Thanks to Facebook Messenger we were able to communicate with our host who told us to meet her at the station in Leuven.
We climbed up out of the station into the center of town and it was beautiful. This was the first time we had spent much time outside of a train or station since we had boarded our flight back at LAX some fourteen hours in the past. The part of town where the train station lets out is (for certain times of the day) off limits to cars; it is a bicycles only area. There is this Kaiser Permanente commercial that is meant to show what the future could be like. In one, it shows the 101 freeway in downtown Los Angeles filled with bicyclists. The bikers are using the lanes and ramps just as cars do, although everyone is quite a bit happier and healthier since they are getting exercise and aren’t stuck inside the smoggy, grimy, gridlocked urbania we know today. This is basically what the bike-only area of Leuven felt like. There were traffic lights and the like, but instead of noisy, dirty cars, folks were getting around (and obeying the traffic lights, rules, etc.) on bikes. Since this was, essentially, our first experience “in the wild” in Europe, I think it caught me even more off guard than it otherwise would have.
Back in the mid–1970s, my wife’s mother lived in Antwerp for several months as a missionary. She has wanted to go back ever since. Antwerp was never on my “must-do” list. In fact, before this trip, I don’t think I knew where it was in relation to the rest of Belgium; I might have even thought it was in the Netherlands. But, it also turned out to be really great. I know I have already said this about other places, but Antwerp was one of my favorite places.
Our Euro-trip ended up overlapping with my wife’s parents’ trip. We met up with them in London, then went to Normandy, Paris, and Antwerp with them. Having my mother-in-law with us in Antwerp made our time there better, I think, than it might have been otherwise; she knew the places to go and see (and what not to go and see).
Bruges is pretty awesome. I will say, it struck as a bit more “touristy” than the other places we visited in Belgium. It makes sense, since it’s such a charming, beautiful place. But, I tend to enjoy the “real” stuff more. This is not to say that Bruges is artificial, I simply mean that because there a lot more tourists, the folks you see/interact with are less likely to be locals. There is something really cool about knowing the less-well-trod side of things. Bruges is gorgeous, but I preferred the less-polished places I think.
Ever since we got back, my wife and I have been semi-seriously trying to figure out how to move to Europe. 4 Almost every time we have talked about this, I have pictured Belgium as the place we would go. Belgium has all of the right combinations of things that really make me see myself there. I ain’t messin’ around here; I already speak French pretty fluently and I have been teaching myself Dutch over the last year since speaking both languages makes living in Belgium even more likely.
I know it is probably just wishful thinking and a bit of a “grass-is-always-greener” mindset, but I have needed something to distract me as of late. Making hypothetical plans about moving to Belgium has been my most recent addiction. My wife at least claims to be into the idea, so I am running with it while I have the energy.
* * * *
Or, as they call them in Europe, the “water closet.” ↩︎
Turnsout: Leuven was one of my favorite places. ↩︎
They don’t call it “high-speed” just for marketing reasons! That thing was cruising along at 300 km/h! ↩︎
There are a lot things motivating that desire, but I’d be lying if I said US politics wasn’t among them. I have always been skeptical of “American Exceptionalism,” and the last four years have taught me just how much I despise huge swaths of American thinking and culture. ↩︎
Here is another little “lecture” thing from my suddenly-online music tech class.
When I was young and dumb, I had a bad attitude about most popular music.1 Now, I appreciate some of that stuff I hated because I understand musical/record production better. Record production really is an art form of its own, sometimes completely disconnected from the music itself.
When I was young and dumb, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the names listed in the liner notes of my favorite albums. I certainly saw those names, but I didn’t really know what their contributions meant. In fact, I distinctly remember seeing that Elvis Costello produced The Specials’ first album (The Specials), but I had no idea what this meant. I only remember this because I knew that Elvis Costello was kind of a big deal, so seeing his name as the producer of this quirky album caught my eye.
I do remember seeing one name several times. His name kept showing up in the “Produced by” slot on some of my favorite albums. This Brian Eno guy kept showing up on my favorite Devo, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2 albums. Still, I didn’t think that much about it until several years later when I saw one of his albums in a record store. I saw this album, Music for Airports by Brian Eno. “Huh. I didn’t know that guy made his own music.” methought to meself. I bought it and was pretty much obsessed with the album for a few years. Nowadays, I kind of halfway worship Brian Eno.
Brian Eno has a very recognizable production style. His productions tend to sound either extra-reverberant, almost drowning in echoes (think The Unforgettable Fire by U2), or really tight, almost jarringly choppy (think Remain in Light by Talking Heads).
All of this is my long way of saying that different people approach the task of musical “production” very differently, some of them in very individualized ways. And, in many cases, knowing exactly what a particular producer may have contributed to a project can be hard to figure out. I have found, though, the more I immerse myself inside a given producer’s work, I am able to trace threads of similarity across their projects; this is likely the producer I am hearing (rather than the songwriter, singer, etc.).
All of that being said, some folks like to divide “post-production” into a couple of loose “schools of thought.”2 Again, using Bobby Owsinski’s definitions as a starting point, we can divide production/mixing styles into roughly four categories. Not-at-all coincidentally, these “production schools” are named after the four capitols of mainstream popular music:
Los Angeles
New York
London
Nashville
First, these “schools” aren’t really schools at all, but are more like approaches to music production/mixing. The reason they are named after these places stems from the folks who were working in these towns in the earlier days of music production and the way they worked. These folks then taught others around them, thus kind of perpetuating a specific approach in the region. In some ways, the connections to these places are gone, now, but the ideas around the “school” give us a good place to start a discussion.
Of these four schools, the Los Angeles school is perhaps the most straightforward. In order to get an idea of what this style is like, try to imagine what music coming out of L.A. in the late–60s through mid–70s sounded like. Think of bands like CSN(Y), Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and (mid–70s) Fleetwood Mac.
While these bands are pretty diverse, stylistically, they all share a similar “sound world.”3 Essentially, while CSNY is a country-ish rock band and Steely Dan is a rock-ish jazz band, both groups sound very clean. When I listen to CSNY, I don’t hear very many effects or other shenanigans; I hear crystal clear guitars and immaculately un-touched (or, un-touched sounding) voices along with kind of wimpy-sounding drums and bass. The CSNY song “Carry On” (from Déjà Vu, 1970) is a perfect example of this. Ditto for “Listen to the Music” by The Doobie Brothers (from Toulouse Street, 1972).
I like the way Bobby Owsinski describes the New York style. He says it is “very punchy and aggressive, just like New Yorkers.” The New York style of mixing and production tends to use a lot of compression, resulting in a heavy, “in your face” feeling (again, kind of like New Yorkers). The New York producers almost all follow a template something like this:
send the drums (sometimes: bass) through a bus as a group
compress the grouped drums
feed the compressed drums back into the mix
sometimes: compress the “remixed” drums, bass again on the returning channel
This New York compression trick can then be accentuated by boosting (sometimes by a lot) both the low and high frequencies on the compressed drums/bass.
The best example of this is on the Living Colour song “Cult Of Personality” (from Vivid, 1988). The drums are enormous, punching you in the face every few seconds. Another example is “A Girl Like You” by The Smithereens (from 11, 1989).
London’s stereotypical sound is one with lots of effects. The New York school relies a lot on compression, while London uses all of the effects. London School productions typically have lots of layers, most of them with a little extra reverb or echo to make everything “swim” a little bit. Arrangement and orchestration are always “part of the mix,” but with the London School, this is extra relevant. In a way, the L.A. studios focused on getting the band that showed up to sound as “real” as possible; New York, takes the band that showed up and makes it sound “big;” London takes the band that showed up and says, “What colors can we add to this?”
The “textbook” example of a London School production is “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” by Yes (from 90125, 1983). Another good one is The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” (from Ghost In The Machine, 1981).
The Nashville style is a bit trickier to pin down. In many ways, it is very similar to the L.A. style, with most of the instruments sounding very “open” and “natural.” Typically, Nashville recordings feature a lot of acoustic instruments, so throwing tons of effects or compression at them doesn’t make a ton of sense. The one thing that makes Nashville sound a little different from Los Angeles is how over-the-top the vocals tend to be. There are some Nashville records where the voice is very, very present, with the accompanying instruments falling pretty far “backward.”
A good example of this is Emmylou Harris’s song “Boulder to Birmingham” (from Pieces of the Sky, 1975). Notice how loud Emmylou’s voice is compared to the band “behind” her.
All of this is just a way to encourage you to think about the music you like and what its priorities are from a production and/or mixing standpoint.
Some ideas:
Think of your favorite albums. Do they have anything in common from a production standpoint? What are the music’s priorities and how does “the mix” support and/or diminish these?
Do you have a favorite producer? How would you describe their style?
* * * * * * * *
Ok. I still do have a pretty bad attitude about most popular music, but for demonstration purposes, let’s pretend I don’t. ↩︎
”Post-production” is a phrase that is often used to describe the stuff that happens after the music has been recorded. I think it used to imply it was postthe creative stage … but, that is very far from the truth anymore. ↩︎
I both hate and love this phrase. It doesn’t really mean anything, yet it is also super helpful. Basically, what I mean is these bands all sound kind of similar from a purely timbral standpoint. ↩︎
COVID-19 means my Digital Audio Recording and Production class must now be a fully-online class. This sucks; it’s not a class that lends itself to well “distance education.” But, here I am trying to figure out how to do all of this online.
Here is a crappy little “lecture” about audio mixing for the curious:
Musicians, engineers, and producers throw around the word “mix” kind of a lot. It’s one of those words that seems meaningful—well, it is meaningful—but means slightly different things to different people.
In its most basic definition, “the mix” is the combination of all of the audio elements in a given recording. Using purely musical terms, this would be something similar to a combination of orchestration, dynamics, and timbre. In engineer-speak, someone might talk about frequency, sympathetic vibration, and amplitude.
Bobby Owsinski defines “the mix” as containing six “elements.” These are:
Balance
Panorama
Frequency
Dimension
Dynamics
Interest
Some of these are more obvious “elements” than others, but these are a good starting point when trying to talk about what “the mix” is, and how to be better at mixing.
In Owsinski’s terms, balance is essentially the “mixing” part of mixing (with a little bit of musical arrangement thrown in). Balance is a description of how each musical voice stacks up compared to the others around it. In one sense, balance is a description of how loud the violin is compared to the cello. But, Owsinski uses the word balance to describe the musical arrangement, meaning, the way the violin and cello interact with another. (Which one is playing “lead?” Which is “supporting?”)
Panorama is the way sounds are presented to us in the “stereo field.” We have two ears and they are sensitive enough (and independent enough) to notice extremely subtle differences based on physical location. When someone speaks into my left ear my brain recognizes the as coming mostly from my left. Our ears are also pretty good—though not quite as good—at hearing things as in front of or behind us.
Stereo recordings—meaning recordings with a discreet “left” and “right” side, each meant for a different speaker—have been around since the early–1960s, becoming essentially standard around 1970. In the mid–1970s there were some brief experiments with mixing music into more than two sides, but it never really caught on. (Of course, this has become almost standard for film and television audio.) So, for our purposes, “panorama” is the way different sounds are presented to us on a L/R axis.
The word frequency is a bit more scientific than some of the others on Bobby Owsinski’s list. In everyday terms, frequency is the “highness” or “lowness” of any given sound. It’s actually a little more complicated than this since sounds are usually combinations of thousands of low-ish and high-ish sounds. In fact, it is this characteristic of sound, the “it’s-more-complicated-than-simply-high-or-low” aspect of musical sounds that makes frequency one of the more difficult elements to try to work with. A bass drum, an electric bass, and the bottom half of the guitar all occupy, more or less, the same spectrum of frequencies; trying to figure out how to make each one sound distinct is the challenge of dealing with this element (and can feel like an endless loop of “tweaking”).
But, in a more general sense, “frequency” is also a description of the overall high vs. low of a recording as a whole. A recording with too much bass (low frequencies) can sound “heavy,” while too much going on up top sounds “light.” What is “correct” is often an aesthetic choice .
This one is actually not even real. When Bobby Owsinski uses the word dimension, he is talking about the perceived “closeness” of a sound. Since there are actually only two speakers in a stereo recording, and these are usually the same distance from our ears, all of the sounds are coming from the same distance … the distance the speakers are from our ears. But, we can sometimes, through the use of echoes, delays, reverbs, and other fancy things, create the illusion that something is farther away or closer to the listener.
Dynamics is the word musicians use to describe the “volume” of a sound (or, rather, the relative volume of sounds). In engineer and science-y terms, this would be “amplitude,” or, more accurately, “amplitude variation.” Essentially, talking about dynamics is talking about how loud stuff is. This applies both in terms of if something is just too bloody loud or if it is too loud compared to something else that is quiet (or at least, something less-loud).
This is also something that is a little bit imaginary. Bobby Owsinski uses the word interest to describe what is essentially some combination of magic, musical quality, aesthetic ideals, and other philosophical navel gazings. Having a mix with “good interest” basically means a mix that “is interesting” … which is more-or-less a case-by-case, meaningless definition.
We will go into a lot more detail with all of these elements in the next few weeks. As you can probably guess, some of these will be easier to quantify and demonstrate than others. We’ll do what we can. For now, it would be cool if you spent some time listening to some of your favorite recordings and tried to decipher how these elements are at work in those recordings.
Oh, and listen to some Radiohead. That’s always a good idea.
The first thing most people have asked us since we got back is some variation of, “What was your favorite place?” Of course, this is a difficult question to answer, given the variety of places we went.
When my wife answers this question, she is pretty quick to say Salzburg was her favorite place. She wishes we had scheduled more time, there. I am less sure (though I would have loved to spend more time in Salzburg). I really enjoyed Brussels for certain reasons, but also really liked Strasbourg and Normandy for entirely different reasons.
All things considered, I think Belgium was my favorite country. This kind of surprised me as I had never really considered Belgium as a “must-see” part of Europe.
Grand Place, Brussels
BELGIUM
Library, University of Leuven
BELGIUM
My beautiful wife in Antwerp
BELGIUM
Strasbourg (France) is pretty magical. I was surprised at how cool it was, given that I didn’t know very much about it before we got therre. Much of the time we were there I had to remind myself that this was an actual place, not a fake “neighborhood” at Disneyland; it really does feel like one of those manufactured experiences at a theme park … but it’s real, of course.
La Petite France, Strasbourg
FRANCE
We didn’t get to spend enough time in France and we didn’t get to visit as many places as I would have liked. Immediately after riding the EuroStar across the channel, we rented a car and drove to first to Juno Beach and then to the village of Beauvoir (near the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey). This area was beautiful. It was quiet and quaint. I would love to find a way to spend a month just kind of drifting in and out of the “bustle” of the touristy stuff like le mont and the (seemingly) laidback lifestyle of the typical Norman fisherman.
Mont-Saint-Michel
FRANCE
Beauvoir
FRANCE
People don’t ask this question as often, but if someone were to ask me about the place I liked the least, I would be able to answer a lot more quickly. Amsterdam. I know a lot of people love Amsterdam, but it was just too much for me. It was chaotic and overwhelming. The actual Netherlanders themselves seemed like perfectly wonderful people, but the touristy-ness of Amsterdam really dissuaded me from loving it. That’s not totally Amsterdam’s fault, I suppose.
Canals, Amsterdam
NETHERLANDS
I was also less-than wowed by Munich. We didn’t venture very far outside the city—just a bus ride to Dachau—so we may have missed what makes Munich great. We were in Strasbourg just before Munich, so that city’s charm might have set Munich up to fail in my eyes.
Marienplatz, Munich
GERMANY
The thing that disappointed me most was Paris, I think. A big part of my disappointment was simply Paris’s reputation; I have dreamed of visiting Paris since I was a young teen, and I had bought into all of the romantic notions we are all told about the “City of Love.” In a nutshell, Paris was dingier and more rundown than I had imagined. The metro trains are kind of rickety, the metro stations are dirty and smelly, there is graffiti in prominent places … in short, Paris is a a big, bustling, modern city struggling with all of the pains places like Los Angeles and New York have to battle everyday. I didn’t notice as many of these “problems” (features?) in some of the other cities, but I may have just been primed to notice them in Paris simply because I had built the city up to be paradise in my head. Some people hate it, but I really like L.A. But, I know the places to avoid and go in knowing there will be annoying “actors” trying to con you into taking a picture with them on the Walk of Fame; I expect there to be grimey alleyways all throughout Silverlake and Echo Park. Paris was dealing with these exact situations … I just didn’t expect it for some reason.
Sacré-C
œ
ur, Montmartre, Paris
FRANCE
I have more to say about all of this, some of which I want to visit in a future post(s).
My wife and I spent a month in Europe this past summer. A few things kind of “fell into place” that made the trip possible, and we had several “excuses” as to why we should go on a big trip (a 40th birthday, a 15th wedding anniversary, and a graduate degree all occurred within a six month period).
I have previously written a little bit about the trip, but have been wanting to do some sort of big “recap” ever since we got back. The problem is, when I put the idea of doing some sort of all encompassing, extra-reflective project, I clam up out of some fear of failure or something … which means I never actually write anything.
I am trying to specifically not think of this (or any other writing/thinking about the trip) as the blog post about the trip, as my official “take” on the whole thing. I do want to somehow kind of make sense of the trip, but any time I sit down to do that, I get intimidated by the idea. So, instead, I am just going to (try to) chip away at my grand “exit interview” as I find the idea interesting and just kind of see where things go.
Right now, the idea of making a series of small posts about the trip and some of my thoughts about it (and the stuff it made me think about) is what sounds manageable, so that’s where I am taking this.
Black = our primary path (almost 100% on trains)
Red = overnight trips in both directions (also on trains)
Green = flights
We were gone for almost exactly a month (all of June, 2019). An entire month seems like a long time until you start trying to allocate how many days you will spend in any one city. The longest we stayed in any one city was only four or five nights, I think. We tried to cram a lot of stuff into those 30-ish days. The major cities we visited were (in this order)1 :
Brussels (and Leuven)
Amsterdam
Strasbourg
Munich
Salzburg
Vienna
Prague
Dresden (and Leipzig)
London
Normandy (not really a city, of course)
Paris
Antwerp (and Bruges)
From here, I think it makes sense to talk a bit about some of the “highlights,” “favorites,” and other such remembrances. Also, the trip rearranged the way I think about certain things, which I want to explore further. It also has me making future plans that revolve around finding a way to go back for a very extended stay—to take a semester, even a year—to really let certain aspects of what I loved about those places “become” part of me.
Stay tuned, I guess.
+ + +
The order seems a little weird, I know. We flew into and out of Brussels but also flew from Prague to London about ⅔ of the way through the trip. ↩︎
A few weeks ago, I decided to start being more honest with the world. There are still a lot of secrets that I am keeping—secrets that may never see the light of day—though this is not what I mean when I say “honest.” What I am trying to say is that I am experimenting with being a bit more open, showing a bit more vulnerability. This is an effort to be more “connected” with the people around me. Things have been really difficult for my family, me especially, over the last year, and I am thinking it’s time to be honest about that. In the past few weeks, I have made a series of Facebook posts that have been pretty raw, definitely more so than usual.
So far, it has gone pretty well, actually. People have been very gracious and appreciative of the things I have said and shared. I have had a few people reach out to me, privately, to say both “thank you” and “I think what you are doing is great.” Like I said above, there are still a lot of things that I am not going to share, things that will be too painful or heart-wrenching to let everyone see. But, I am feeling some relief by sharing these things, and I am learning that most of us aren’t as alone as we might fear. It has only been a few weeks, of course, but I have already noticed a difference in the way I think about my anxieties and treat the situations wherein I find myself.
I am sometimes quite shy. It takes a long time for me to feel inclined to let anyone “in,” to even participate in small talk. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I am this way. I like to think that I am more thoughtful than I am vocal (which I think is at least partly true), but I have a suspicion that I might also be a little untrusting, maybe even judgmental of others. Often, I am fine to just sit and observe or listen when I am stuck in a social situation. Parties and the like can be kind of tricky for me; I don’t mind being there, but I am reluctant to actually be social, especially with the group. This can sometimes come across as cocky or uninterested, which doesn’t help my case.
Something I am learning about myself—well, I guess I always knew it, but I am learning to recognize it better—is that I am very empathetic. I mean this in the sense that I have the talent/ability/skill/curse of being able to really feel what other people feel. If I see someone I know start to cry, I have a hard time keeping it together myself. This, even when I might be clueless as to why they are crying. In many ways, this is a good thing; among other things, it means that I feel like I can really understand people, that I can really connect with them. But, it also means that I end up carrying some of their burdens without realizing it.
I suppose my empathetic-ness could be partly to blame for my reticence toward letting people “in.” I wonder if this is a form of self preservation; talking to too many people, being too social might end up with me feeling too many things, carrying too many burdens.
If you ever see me at a party:
You must have a life as boring as mine, because I go to something like one party a year, and
Please know that it’s probably not me being cocky if I seem standoffish; it is more likely just me trying to figure out how to be social in the current context
I love my kids. That’s the first thing that needs to be established. But, there are a lot of times that I don’t really like them.
Right now, I am taking a combination of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. I have been on this regimen for quite a while ... a few years at least. I have been prescribed various other treatments over the past eighteen years. Things are relatively stable, now, but I am still “under treatment” and probably will be forever. Sometimes, though, I get busy or am away from home and I fall behind on my medication. Surprisingly, I can feel a difference after missing only a few doses. The thing that I notice first is how much I start to dislike my kids (and others) when my meds wear off. Essentially, I can feel myself slipping into a really short sense of patience with them and I get annoyed and/or angry with them pretty fast.
I have come to terms with the fact that I am someone who lives with a form of mental illness. I don’t really like this fact, but lots of people live with lots of health issues and we don’t make that big of a deal about most of them so mine shouldn’t be much different. But, what I don’t like is that I have to take medicine to feel like liking my kids. Without the meds, I really don’t like my kids. This makes me feel as if the way I really am is as a father that hates his kids, and it’s only through medication that he is able to not be instantly annoyed by them. (With the medication, things are still rough. I still struggle to find a sense of equilibrium with them, but it is significantly easier when I am fully medicated.)
Things have been extra rough chez nous recently. There has been a lot of yelling, a lot of locking of doors and taking away of privileges. There hasn’t been nearly as much “Home Can Be A Heaven On Earth” as I think we are supposed to have. It has been exhausting and kind of heartbreaking for my wife and I to feel the rollercoaster of moods, volumes, and changes in our home environment everyday over the past months.
This isn’t a cry for sympathy or anything like that. I have recently been making an effort to be a bit more “real” with the world. I am pretty bad at socializing, but I do feel like I am relatively good at writing, so this is a semi-comfortable way for me to try to connect with others and be a little more vulnerable (which is supposedly a healthy way to deal with stuff).
Until earlier this week I had never visited a French-speaking country. This, despite the fact that I minored in French in college and had a job speaking French for about six months.
My wife and I are in Europe for a month. We left Los Angeles on June 3 and we will be back on July 2. Both of us have been to parts of Europe before—Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary for me; Germany, Czechia, Austria, and Hungary for her—but neither of us have been to France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, or England (all places on our itinerary this month).1 We have talked about doing a trip like this ever since we got married (2003). But, stuff like this is expensive, and things like school, careers, kids, and life get in the way of ideas like that. But, this year brought a lot of big things: our fifteenth (!) wedding anniversary was last December, my wife turned forty in January, and she graduated with her Master of Music degree this past May. So, there is quite a lot of stuff to celebrate, and we decided now was the time to finally make this trip happen.2
Between us, my wife is definitely the one with vacation-planning skills. Once we decided “it is time,” she got to work looking for flights, booking hotels, etc. I think we booked our flights back in August, 2018, with some hotels, etc. following not terribly long afterward. She deserves most of the credit for all of that, though she did ask me to book a handful of the logistics as a birthday gift to her back in January. By February we were done and done (almost) with all of the logistical planning.3
But, a few days ago we flew from LA to Paris and then took a train to Brussels.4 Navigating Charles de Gaulle airport was pretty tricky, especially trying to figure out how to get to our train. Eventually, we decided it was time to ask someone for help. Of course, almost everyone that works for the airlines speaks English, but I really wanted to “have a go” with trying to not look like a dumb American that expects everyone to speak English. So, I approached the guy at the Air France help desk and just launched into my question: “Je dois trouver un train à Bruxelles. Il a été réservé avec Air France.” And, he just gave me what I needed to know (en français, bien sûr). Better yet, I understood 80-ish% (the important 80%) of the stuff he said!
In December, I decided it would be a good idea for me to take something of a “refresher course” in French. So, I signed up for Conversational French 1 at my local community college (not the one where I teach, as this class wasn’t in our schedule for the Spring 2019 semester). This class was (almost) entirely in French. Before the first day of classes, it had been a good 13+ years since I had spoken French or had anyone really check in on my fluency.5 The first few days were rough; I didn’t really follow much of what the professor was saying, nor did I feel confident saying much of anything. Things got better, of course, and, by the end, I was feeling significantly more confident talking with the other students and the professor. Still, when you talk with other students or a professor, you can always fall back on English when you get stuck (“Comment dit-on [insert English word]?”), so I was still pretty nervous as arriving in Paris got closer and closer. This question was my first entrée into the world or speaking French without training wheels since 2004/5. It felt nice to have some success.
I get it that my question was relatively simple. That’s a first-year-of-high-school-French level of question. Still, it felt really nice to have that validation from an actual Parisian. Also, he might have secretly been laughing at me, but he did a good job of hiding it.
+++
We are also visiting Germany, Austria, and Czechia this time. ↩︎
We also have friends that are currently living in both Leuven (Belgium) and Prague, which makes the whole idea even easier to actualize. ↩︎
Some of the train specifics turned out to be more involved than we thought. We are still trying to work some of that out as we speak. ↩︎
We actually thought we were booking a flight to Brussels, as the whole thing was booked via Air France and the second portion just looked like another flight at first glance. ↩︎
Except for that little green owl in Duolingo. ↩︎
The SD Voyager, an online magazine, just published a story about me.
The TL;DR version: I took a kind of crooked path to get where I am today. Apparently, that makes me “inspiring” or something.
Cuyamaca Sessions is a podcast produced by students in the Music Industry Studies Program at Cuyamaca College. Behold, our first episode!