Tag: instrument

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Dream Journal

A Nice Victorian Space to Fix Things and Learn

I’m being shown around a pale yellow Victorian house, with a complicated and extensive layout that is home for many. I’m considering moving in or helping folks who live there. I peer out a window in the upper floor and am confused for a moment by the jarring blank modern walls, but realize it’s the building next door. Shame… would be a beautiful view of the curved glowing sky above (is this Victorian housing complex in space?). While inspecting a niche and one of the rooms, examining how a tiny hand wash sink has been built into the alcove, I realized there’s a small gap in the baseboard that I can reach through. Probably no person has realized the space exists in many decades.

A map of the island of Hispaniola shows an exaggerated elevation relief, showing the stark vertical east-west border line. The obvious inconvenience really shows how Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been harmed by such an artificial imposed border, even one from hundreds of years ago.

In a wide-open top floor attic lounge space I take it upon myself to repair three stylish pianos. They’re arranged elegantly back-to-back in a triangle, the base ends tilted to be slightly larger. Guests of the lounge are starting to come in for the evening. I’m pleased to find that each piano has a different sound, one has a delightful 1960s electric organ tone.

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Dream Journal

An Instrument Case Full of Instruments

I carry around a huge case shaped like an upright base, but it’s filled with all manner of instruments in different compartments. For whatever reason right now, the only one I want to play is banjo.

I merge onto a pandemic-stricken 24th Street, the commercial corridor near my home here in the Mission District. Empty businesses line the far side. Posters advertising kratom have taken place of the storefronts.

Gazing at the face of an old acquaintance, Katie Petro, and remembering we dated once. Her identity was later lost and rediscovered.

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Dream Journal

Jam Band Like an Accident

Red baby rats lined up to be picked out, males and females unseparated. Some turn in to guinea pigs, oddly. Those not picked will actually grow up to be deer, and future breeding stock. I pick them out in front of a girl with short hair, who reminds me of Allie (a rival of my wife who I recently accidentally matched on OkCupid).

I use the word “Dlv’je’DOY” in some kind of encoding, in French. I consider typing it out phonetically so only native speakers will get it as no automatic translation could hope to parse this double-encoding.

An improvised jam band challenge. Several instrumentalists sitting around playing what would appear to be incidentally placed instruments. Playing an OMFO mix. A double-reed single-spiral conical horn, ancient Arabic-looking instrument — a guy plays the first bar of his solo, quickly whips out a clanging metal belt and uses lubricant on the aluminum. Meanwhile the more traditional single-reed guy next to him covers this interruption. He excalims, inexplicably but with great gusto, “Bulpas!”

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Dream Journal

Three Guys Troll the Bus Driver

Three guys are sitting on a bus, just behind the driver. They start reading from a binder with a script, half-pretending to be practicing for an upcoming production. But the real goal is to act out a believable conversation three people could actually have on a bus that’s so absurd, so disturbing, so weird, that the bus driver can’t ignore it. That didn’t take long, and the driver stops the bus and thoroughly chew them out, saying it doesn’t even matter whether it’s real or whatever, where would someone even get this weird-ass shit? The whole thing is hilarious to the utmost.

A school band is demoing some of their unique instruments. The one I remember has trumpet valves and horn bottom half, with a clarinet’s mouthpiece top. It ends up sounding a bit like a saxophone, actually.

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Dream Journal

Oops, Giant Flute

Walking back from somewhere, I stop in at a store on 24th street (near my home) that sells music equipment. It has a spare layout, isolated displays in little clumps, floor models on display. With help from the staff I pick out a curious modern version of a traditional flute, with big playful colored buttons instead of finger holes. Taking it out of the bag to play on the way home, I discover that I’ve been given what is actually an absurd 11 foot long pipe — the one I picked out being most likely 11 inches. How did they not notice?! Rather amused, I know I’ll soon go back and exchange it, but play this more expensive monstrosity for fun in the meantime.