Category Archives: Lucubrations

17 Days.

IMG_0229      For a couple of weeks now I’ve been waking up in a world without Prince in it, and I can’t say that I like it very much.
Here’s something I’ve never told anybody, because it’s kind of silly: when I was 4, I had a series of dreams involving a strange, mysterious man with curly hair and a long purple coat who lived in a huge factory all alone, where he made amazing things that everybody loved, with no wife, and no kids of his own, and no family. I kind of figured the person in my dream was the adult I would eventually become.
But the year after the dreams happened, I saw “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” there he was: Willy Wonka, apparently the guy I had dreamed about. And from that point on, I felt a strong connection to Mr. Wonka until 7 years later, when I saw Prince’s 1999 video. There he was: the curly headed weird dude in the purple coat from my dreams. They seemed to me essentially the same person, almost an archetype.
When I was 13, I was very devout: raised Catholic, Catholic school, altar boy…I was actually considering the priesthood.  Seriously.  But I was very conflicted, because when I was 13, I also discovered girls.  I had no idea what to do with them, but I knew it didn’t involve marriage or children, which, according to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic, was the whole point of girls.  I suddenly had very real issues with the 10th Commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.  Clearly Our Lord had not grown up on my block and hadn’t seen my neighbor’s wife.  I was this little lust ball who also wanted to be square with God, but it sounded like I had to choose the sacred or the profane, for never could the twain meet.  Then, at pretty much the perfect moment, along comes Prince, effortlessly rectifying the dichotomy for me and every other libidinous adolescent: you can have as many threesomes you want on Saturday night, as long as you managed to drag your sorry carcass to  church at some point on Sunday.   Problem solved.  Of course I started looking more into music as a career instead of the priesthood, but ultimately that was probably for the best for all concerned.
The thing that really sucks about the last 17 days is more difficult to describe.  It’s something I feel as a human, but specifically as an artist.  There have always been 4-5 artists that not only influenced but enabled and inspired me.  Questlove described it precisely last week: “I don’t know. There’s so much we all don’t know. This is what I do know: Much of my motivation for waking up at 5 a.m. to work — and sometimes going to bed at 5 a.m. after work — came from him. Whenever it seemed like too steep a climb, I reminded myself that Prince did it, so I had to also. It was the only way to achieve that level of greatness (which was, of course, impossible, but that’s aspirational thinking for ya). For the last twenty years, whenever I was up at five in the morning, I knew that Prince was up too, somewhere, in a sense sharing a workspace with me. For the last few days, 5 a.m. has felt different. It’s just a lonely hour now, a cold time before the sun comes up.”
There is a extraordinary amount of fuel and inspiration to be derived knowing that there are these other people breathing the same air as you, who are doing the same thing as you.  Just when you’ve dissected their last project and mastered it, they release a new book or record and you check it out and you head straight back into the studio try to replicate it and even aspire to outdo them.  I’ve had 5 such people with me since the ’80s.  Prince was the fourth one to die in the last 10 years, and the last 10 years has been when I’ve need their presences the most.
This world is getting dreadfully lonely.

El Nino, My Ass.

Each of the past 3 sordid summers have been filled with meteorologists hyperventilating hopefully about how “this year” is going to be an El Nino year, and fear not, it’s gonna rain like Thailand in monsoon season starting in November.  Well, okay, December (when it doesn’t rain in November). Um, well, probably January (when it doesn’t rain in December), ad nauseam.  And then if we make it halfway through February, do they admit incompetence or stupidity?  Of course not.  “This just means that we’re going to have a La Nina in the fall.”  I learned to ignore these incompetent prognostications long ago, dismiss them as propaganda from the climate change crowd intended to stave off the inevitable Great California Water Riots just a little longer, but I must admit that they really had me going this year.  Promises of the “strongest El Nino in 40 years” along with apocalyptic graphics of computer-modeled weather systems descending on the west coast of North America like the very hand of a vengeful and wrathful Old Testament God had me believing.  And I wasn’t alone.  I don’t know anybody who actually began construction on an ark, but I do know at least two homeowners who either purchased or augmented flood insurance in anticipation of le grand déluge.  Supplies were stocked up on, toddlers taught to swim, and the elderly and infirm were fitted with flotation devices.  And then we gazed at the darkening sky and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  

And we’re still waiting.  As of this writing, not a drop of rain has fallen in 3 weeks.  Oh sure, the “unseasonably warm” temperatures associated with El Nino are in full effect.  But those are supposed to be the unfortunate side effects of three solid months of monsoons, not…this.  Oman got more rain than we did this month.  

What I really resent is the people who, when I’m bitching about the complete failure and ineptitude of modern meteorology, particularly in regard to this farce of an El Nino, tell me that, well, we’re getting a lot of snow in the mountains and that’s what really makes the water supply, and blah blah blah fuck you.  Rain is binary: it’s either raining, or it’s not.  If you say it’s going to rain for a week straight, and not a drop falls that week, you should be dismissed as a cretin and a fraud.  And if you are an accredited “meteorologist” who actually makes money prognosticating things like this, and your record is consistently more inaccurate than randomly generated guesses, you should be fired, stomped, and shot in the balls with rock salt.  

Rather than taking some prefabricated (and apparently completely mythical) weather pattern and trying to force it onto an uncooperative reality, I am just going to accept reality as a “phenomenon” and give it a name and use it to foretell the future.  El Nino is no more.  The weather system most perpetually endemic to California is to be known as La Cogida Seca, and it means intolerable heat and fire for 9 months out of the year, followed by 3 winter months of barely tolerable heat, slightly less fire, but no real precipitation ever.  We are clearly in a La Cogida Seca year now, as the previous 10 years have been, and my forecast is for at least 7 more of this nonsense.  Get out while you can.  And learn to drink whiskey instead of water.  

La Cogida Seca