Song Talk with Morry Campbell

Soap box rant #1

Because it's election day, and because I've been mulling it over in my head for a few days, I'm going to get up on my soap box and put my 2 cents in on the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear.

I say, with one caveat, hoo-rah for you, Mr. Stewart. You said a lot of things that needed to be said. And yes, both the left and the right are guilty of demonizing the other side, gross exaggeration, and in trying to spin everything so that it makes "them" look bad and "us" look good.

Now for the caveat: Mr. Stewart, you talk like the guilt is equally shared across the board. It is not. You make comparisons between Fox News and MSNBC as if they are mirror images of each other, polar opposites, different only in the slant of the politics. The implication is, the right may have Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, etc., but the left has Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. And while this is true in the sense that Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hanity, Malkin, etc are on the right, and Olbermann and Maddow are on the left, that is where the accuracy of that comparison ends.

First of all, to compare Rachel Maddow to any of the talking heads on Fox or to Limbaugh is kind of crazy. Ms. Maddow always conducts herself with grace, humor and aplomb, treating even guests with whom she vehemently disagrees with respect and dignity. Even the unsavory "pray away the gay" Richard Cohen was treated with respect as Ms. Maddow called him out on some of the more outlandish statements he has made in the press and in his writings, and pointed out to her viewers that he has been disbarred from the APA and is not licensed to practice psychological therapy by any American or other licensing body.

Admittedly, with Keith Olbermann, the comparison may be a bit more fair. A bit.

You are NOT the majority

Okay, I'm sick to death of hearing from tea partiers and other far-right conservatives that they represent the majority. I'm especially getting tired of the erroneous, historically inaccurate comparison between current tea partiers and the good folks who executed the original Boston Tea Party. The historical folks were protesting taxation without representation. Tea partiers: you have representation. You presumably voted. And you lost. Basic math: if you as a block of voters cast your ballot and you LOSE the election, this means that fewer people voted for your candidate than voted for the other candidate. This means that you are NOT a majority, and you do not speak for the majority of Americans. It is bizarre to still claim that yours are the values of the majority.

If you rally your troops and manage to topple the democratic majority in the fall, then congratulations. More power to you. But I'm saying this one more time. You are not currently the majority. You have representation. You are not being persecuted.

Out of the sleep closet

In the interest of giving more attention to a medical problem that's probably very pervasive but not much talked about, I'm coming out of the closet in this blog post as an insomniac. I have been having sleep issues for the past three years. I haven't slept for a full night in all that time, and I can count the times I've been able to fall asleep in that time without medication on one hand. Even after taking a sleeping pill (ambien, or the generic equivalent thereof), I might still not sleep very much or very well.

And why am I putting this up on the internet? A few reasons. To be perfectly honest, I hope anyone reading and wondering why my posts kind of dried up will be understanding and come back, and keep reading.

Second, I think there's a lot of guilt and shame around not being able to sleep. Somehow it's my fault, or I'm a bad person so I can't sleep, or whatever. I know I've felt like that sometimes. And like everything that is surrounded by guilt and shame, it kind of loses its power a bit when it's pulled out into the sunlight.

And third, because I'm frustrated that even the medical community seems not to take sleeping problems seriously. I can usually function fairly well on very little sleep, so often I can pass for a normal-sleeping person in day-to-day interactions. But recently, the sleeping pill of choice has seemed to stop working, and I've been getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep a night, not much better than taking nothing at all, and the past few days I've been positively dragging through the day.

 I finally broke down and made an appointment with a sleep clinic. I met with the doctor, he gave me "homework" in the form of a Sleep Log, that I'm supposed to keep for two weeks, and gave me a prescription for a different kind of sleeping pill.

As the appointment was in the evening, I did not have time to get the prescription to my pharmacist until the next day. I bring it down to my pharmacy around 9:30 this morning. It turns out that my insurance will not pay for this new prescription, and that without insurance it is $230. I may be able to get a waver, but the request has to come from the doctor prescribing the medication.

So I immediately call the sleep clinic, and explain the problem to them, and they tell me that they'll get on it, to get the "special permission" that the insurance company needs in order to consider making an exception. I don't hear from them for a few hours, but then remember that my doctor wrote his phone number on the card, and figure I'll talk to him directly and let him know what is going on, and maybe I should get something that my insurance company would pay for without making me jump through a bunch of hoops. Funny story, he gave me a phone number he cannot be reached at.

I eventually get patched back into the main office of the sleep clinic, and I tell them that I want something for tonight, so if I can't get the super duper special sleeping pills, just something different than what I'm taking that will still be covered by the insurance company. The guy on the phone says he's faxing in the special request to my insurance company, and that it may take a day or two. Which means another sleepless night for me, so I say let me talk to a doctor, he says they're both in session, and someone will call me when they're available.

Fast forward to 5:30PM, and as my appointment was at 6:00PM yesterday, and that was when it looked as if the office closed up, I decide that I'd better give it one more try. I get an answering machine, telling me the regular hours are 9-5, and to leave a message and they'll get back to me tomorrow. Guess yesterday was special. My appointment was for 6:00.

So, if even the medical professionals who claim to be sleep experts don't take the problem they treat seriously, that's a problem. And don't get me started on the little prick of an insurance bureaucrat who decided that I didn't need the pills and denied me, and is probably sleeping perfectly well tonight.

So I'm coming out of the Insomnia closet. I'll let you know how it goes.

M

Interesting writing experiment

I was in an Alexander Technique workshop recently that asked me to write down ten things I want using my right hand, then again using my left hand. I was terrible at writing with my left hand. But it intrigued me. If indeed the right hand is wired to the left side of the brain, and the left is wired to the right side (an oversimplification, but stay with me here), wouldn't it make sense that using the left hand to write with, using both hands to write with at the same time, would be a great way to integrate the two hemispheres of the brain? I've been trying it. I write in my journal with my right hand, then answer with the left. I have little conversations back and forth with myself. I suppose that's a little schizophrenic, but it's an interesting ongoing experiment.

Try it. I got a great song verse out of my left hand. Perhaps my right hand would have thought of it too, but it didn't.

I'm off for a few days to visit some family in Minnesota. Will see you all when I get back. Have a great week/weekend.

xo,

M

More fuel for copyright thought

Here's another article, given attention by ASCAP in their daily brief, on the whole vexing issue of copyright protection, and by extension, piracy. Because ASCAP is promoting this article in their brief, I can only assume that I'm being asked to take it seriously. And perhaps the article's author, Willem H. Buiter, makes some good points along the way. But some of his points, and in fact one of the big, particularly "scary" points he makes, is patently ludicrous.

Staying un-stuck

For reasons beyond my control, my songwriting group is only meeting once this month. And that's tonight. The good part of that is that everyone, including me of course, had extra time to prepare a song following the current guidelines; i.e. write a song in 3/4 time. And I have one. In my estimation a pretty good one. And I also have a rewrite of last month's song, ready for a second round of critiquing. What's a guy to do? Which brings me to the point. Once a month isn't enough.

I've been sitting on these songs, practicing them so I can sing them correctly, and at this point both are almost memorized. I could probably do either of them at a gig without too much trouble. So the question becomes, what am I going to do with the criticism I get from tonight's group? The more set a song becomes, the more difficult it becomes to make changes based on feedback. When we only meet once a month, it's too easy to let things set up.

When we work alone, as many of us do, it's easy to work in a vacuum, writing for ourselves, and to hell with what anyone else thinks of it. And that's fine for making records that we want to keep in the basement. But if we want our music heard and appreciated by anyone other than our mother (hi mom!) it's essential, or at the very least extremely valuable, to get objective, outside feedback from someone, preferably before the song has had a chance to "set up."

So we either have to meet more often, or I have to wrote more than one or two songs a month...time to become an insufferable overachiever?

Future shock

We're entering a Brave New World. Soon, everything we do online will be traceable, if it is not already. Privacy is going to be a huge issue. This is not an urban fairy tale or a Sci-fi espionage story, this is happening. Here's two articles that go into a little detail; one from the New York Times summarizing and speculating a little about the future, and one kind of chilling story about Comcast picking up a twitter and acting on it as if they were notified by the customer. 

There might be some good things about this. It looks as if the technology will be available to everyone, and yes, it will allow small businesses (and indie musicians) to do their own market research and demographics. However, is it worth the price? There are real issues of privacy at risk here. It's all very 1984, and I am not sure I'm ready for it. Does that make me sound like a Luddite?

Great video

Hey, y'all,

I  am veering from the usual songwriting fare to post this video. This is one of the clearest, most concise debunkings of the scare-mongering arguments put forth by the Far Right against Marriage Equality.

And, hell, why not write a song about it?

Hmmmm...

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

— Bertrand Russell