My Tribe

    This blog’s been neglected for months now, mainly because there wasn’t much I felt like writing about and coincided with an acute case of who-gives-a-shit-what-I-think-anyway. Last month, I hauled my wife and trombone to Valencia, Spain, to hang with my sister and brother trombone players at the International Trombone Festival, put on every year by, not coincidentally, the International Trombone Association, of which I’m a member and a part of the staff of it’s quarterly Journal. (That could be the longest sentence I’ve ever written.) This festival has been held every summer since 1971 and I’ve been to three of them. The first was in New Orleans in 2005, which was particularly special, coming right before Katrina and I made it to Austin in 2010. For four days it’s all trombones, all the time and now I’ve got something to write about (though the jury’s still out on the gives-a-shit part)

    For me, one of the perks, come to think of it the only perk, of being able to write for the Journal is that I get to freely associate, even if only by email or telephone, with some of the finest, most well-known trombone players in the world. At the festival this year I got to do that in person and (allow me to name-drop) my hang-mates included Abbie Conant, Branimir Slokar, Andrea Conti and Bart van Lier. If these names are unfamiliar, all I can say is that these folks are on bass clef Mt. Olympus.

HOW TO BE A TOURIST

            A couple of weeks ago we made our second annual trip to the prefecture to ask Marianne* to let us stay here for another year. Among the paperwork required for our  carte de sejour, Cynthia and I have to sign statements swearing that we will not seek employment in France. This, coupled with my language incompetence has the effect of making us perpetual foreigners and permanent tourists.

            As if to prove it, this year Cynthia set for us a touring schedule at times so hectic that I wondered if her doctor had given her only 6 months to live.  We bought a used car back in May and have already put nearly 15,000 kilometers on it. This might not seem like much to an American, but considering that until two weeks ago we were living in an apartment, using public transit and shoe-leather express most of the time, it's a shitload.

            *Marianne is the symbol of France.

           

Gummi Puppen?

This post is dedicated to the memory of a friend.

            A long time ago I abandoned the idea of ever making any money writing or that anything I had to say was of much interest to anyone. This blog is evidence of that, more or less. Despite this I always write with the idea of trying to please some unknown someone (writing for your readers) but this one is for me. I have nothing more in mind than pleasing myself as I remember a dear friend whose worth to me became even more apparent after he'd gone. So I'm warning you now that this post has a bunch of video clips attached to it and I have no idea how it'll turn out. The idea occurred to me sometime before June as we were approaching the 70th anniversary of D-Day but between travel and preparing a presentation on the trombone for Bordeaux-USA, I'm only getting around to it now. In putting together my trombone project, I learned how to use Imovie and went a little nuts making videos. The same thing happened again and for the past week or so, I've been working on clips to stick into this post.

Incident At Milepost 49

The HoJo at Oakmont looked just like this

             Lately, I haven't been posting much for reasons that really don't matter but have resulted in my going through some of the essays and other writing that I've had laying around for a long time. Over the years, I've accumulated a trove of mediocrity that I once thought was pretty good. At some point, everyone even semi-serious about writing imagines their masterpieces being featured in the New Yorker or some other lofty publication and I was no different. But most of my stuff was written with no idea where it could possibly find the light of day. I paid no attention to any of the advice every aspiring writer gets on researching markets and how to appeal to editors or anything else that might have at least gotten me some encouraging rejection slips. So now I've decided that if none of this stuff is ever going to make me a member of the next Algonquin Round Table, I'm foisting it off from time to time on whoever runs across this blog accidentally in the course of surfing for pornography.
       
           The first of these I've rewritten so many times I can't stand it anymore. It was intended originally for some now defunct online magazine in Pittsburgh and I think I was encouraged by most of the previously published pieces being worse. I'm not sure Thurber would have gotten very far, either, if his mantra had been, "Shit, I'm not that bad."

Bruce le Mec Blanc

            

          

           As my wife and family can tell you, I'm possessed of a disposition so perpetually sunny and upbeat that, sensing they can't possibly match it, others are sometimes brought down. Knowing you're everyone's favorite Pollyanna can be a pretty heavy burden at times and that could be why I've spent the past couple of months at the whogivesashiterie. Maybe I've been here in France long enough to be turning into a brooding existentialist - a sort of human version of Henri le Chat noir. Incidently, Henri's French isn't much better than mine so I must be making some progress if I'm picking up on grammatical errors in a cat video. Anyway, I hope the recent sparseness of postings hasn't disappointed anyone coming here looking for their positivity fix.

We're Number Somewhere Between 0 and 51

            When I started this blog, telling our family and friends about our move to France was mainly an excuse to get me into the habit of writing on a regular basis. I never really had a plan or goal and figured, like the rest of my life I'd just make it up as I went along.  After all, who was going to read it anyway? Most of the world is too busy reading and promoting their own blogs. But if you're one of the hundreds worldwide who haven't started blogging, Google's Blogger comes with a handy "stats" function that shows you how many "page views" you've had and can suck you into believing you could be the next (If I knew of anyone, here's where I would insert the name of a somebody who found wealth and fame by airing grievances on the internet).