Among my many hidden talents are the ability to play several musical instruments. Or to almost play several musical instruments. That is, I play a couple of instruments, and I almost-play a couple of instruments.
The instruments I can play are the guitar, and the piano. I'm way better at the piano, including knowing by memory a couple of very impressive songs that I can just sit down and tear into. You have to be able to do that because if you play an instrument and people find out they will always ask you to play something, and if you say "Oh, well, I need my sheet music to play that" then they think you're just a big liar, because real musicians can just sit down and play something.
Like in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Sweetie and I saw on a date last night, when [SPOILER ALERT INVOLVING A DATE AND A FUNNY SONG] the guy who is trying to forget Sarah Marshall is at a bar and his date asks him to play a song from his Dracula musical, he gets up there and just plays it. That's what you have to do -- if you can play an instrument and people ask you to do so, you better play something. So I can do that, only I don't play funny Dracula-based songs. I just play "Chariots of Fire." But that's pretty impressive.
I also play guitar, but not as well. I don't volunteer that I can play guitar because if you tell people you can play guitar, they expect you to be all Eddie Van Halen, and I am not Eddie Van Halen-esque at all. My guitar playing is based on 3 chords, but I'm not an All I've Got Is A Red Guitar, 3 chords and the truth kind of guitar player. I'm more of an All I've got is an old rental acoustic guitar, 3 chords, and they're the same three chords you hear in "Michael, Row The Boat Ashore." But I can play most of "Free Falling" by Tom Petty. And "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." There is something that's very punk rock about a 39-year-old mostly bald guy playing Should I Stay Or Should I Go on an acoustic guitar while watching Battlestar Galactica and trying to keep the cats from eating his guitar strings. VERY punk rock.
The other instrument I play really well is the pretend harmonica, which is played when I hear the song "Desire" by U2 and the harmonica part comes on and I pretend I'm playing a harmonica by holding up my hands as though I'm holding a harmonica and hum, harmonica style. I am very good at that.
I'm better at that than I was at real harmonica, which I tried to learn but failed at. And I'm better at all my instruments than I am at bagpipes. I wanted so desperately to learn to play the bagpipes. Sweetie got me an actual set for my law school graduation, and I got a practice bagpipe, and I took lessons, but in the end, bagpipes were beyond me and now I keep them around as a memento of a time when I thought I could take on the whole world, or at least the whole world of bagpipe-learning. And the Babies! like to play with them and use them to hit me in the eye.
I don't so much try to learn instruments these days; I spend most of my time on more mundane pursuits like working and cleaning up the macaroni the Babies! throw on the floor and trying to figure out whether or not Dennis DeYoung went into space. The usual. But if there was on instrument I'd like to learn to play, it's The Best Musical Instrument That's So Lame It's Cool.
That might be a new record. I bet it was 300 words before I got around to today's topic. (It was 638.)
The Best Musical Instrument That's So Lame It's Cool is the banjo. And the banjo is lame for one main reason: It's associated with homicidal rapists. So, it's a pretty good reason, but it's a lame reason for making the banjo lame.
The banjo is forever linked to the song "Duelin' Banjos,"
A song which is forever linked in my mind with the year my older brother, who also tried to play guitar, had to try to play "Duelin' Banjos," which is a duet, on his acoustic guitar. For the whole family. At Christmas. He made it through, but those were the two slowest duelin' banjos you've ever seen. They were duelin' in molasses.
"Duelin' Banjos" is forever linked in everyone else's mind, I've learned, with the movie Deliverance, which I've never seen but which I gather is made up entirely of a male-on-male rape scene because that's all anyone ever talks about. It's because of that scene that when I say something like I wish I could play banjo, people say things like ewww and But I thought you were married.
The instruments I can play are the guitar, and the piano. I'm way better at the piano, including knowing by memory a couple of very impressive songs that I can just sit down and tear into. You have to be able to do that because if you play an instrument and people find out they will always ask you to play something, and if you say "Oh, well, I need my sheet music to play that" then they think you're just a big liar, because real musicians can just sit down and play something.
Like in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Sweetie and I saw on a date last night, when [SPOILER ALERT INVOLVING A DATE AND A FUNNY SONG] the guy who is trying to forget Sarah Marshall is at a bar and his date asks him to play a song from his Dracula musical, he gets up there and just plays it. That's what you have to do -- if you can play an instrument and people ask you to do so, you better play something. So I can do that, only I don't play funny Dracula-based songs. I just play "Chariots of Fire." But that's pretty impressive.
I also play guitar, but not as well. I don't volunteer that I can play guitar because if you tell people you can play guitar, they expect you to be all Eddie Van Halen, and I am not Eddie Van Halen-esque at all. My guitar playing is based on 3 chords, but I'm not an All I've Got Is A Red Guitar, 3 chords and the truth kind of guitar player. I'm more of an All I've got is an old rental acoustic guitar, 3 chords, and they're the same three chords you hear in "Michael, Row The Boat Ashore." But I can play most of "Free Falling" by Tom Petty. And "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." There is something that's very punk rock about a 39-year-old mostly bald guy playing Should I Stay Or Should I Go on an acoustic guitar while watching Battlestar Galactica and trying to keep the cats from eating his guitar strings. VERY punk rock.
The other instrument I play really well is the pretend harmonica, which is played when I hear the song "Desire" by U2 and the harmonica part comes on and I pretend I'm playing a harmonica by holding up my hands as though I'm holding a harmonica and hum, harmonica style. I am very good at that.
I'm better at that than I was at real harmonica, which I tried to learn but failed at. And I'm better at all my instruments than I am at bagpipes. I wanted so desperately to learn to play the bagpipes. Sweetie got me an actual set for my law school graduation, and I got a practice bagpipe, and I took lessons, but in the end, bagpipes were beyond me and now I keep them around as a memento of a time when I thought I could take on the whole world, or at least the whole world of bagpipe-learning. And the Babies! like to play with them and use them to hit me in the eye.
I don't so much try to learn instruments these days; I spend most of my time on more mundane pursuits like working and cleaning up the macaroni the Babies! throw on the floor and trying to figure out whether or not Dennis DeYoung went into space. The usual. But if there was on instrument I'd like to learn to play, it's The Best Musical Instrument That's So Lame It's Cool.
That might be a new record. I bet it was 300 words before I got around to today's topic. (It was 638.)
The Best Musical Instrument That's So Lame It's Cool is the banjo. And the banjo is lame for one main reason: It's associated with homicidal rapists. So, it's a pretty good reason, but it's a lame reason for making the banjo lame.
The banjo is forever linked to the song "Duelin' Banjos,"
A song which is forever linked in my mind with the year my older brother, who also tried to play guitar, had to try to play "Duelin' Banjos," which is a duet, on his acoustic guitar. For the whole family. At Christmas. He made it through, but those were the two slowest duelin' banjos you've ever seen. They were duelin' in molasses.
"Duelin' Banjos" is forever linked in everyone else's mind, I've learned, with the movie Deliverance, which I've never seen but which I gather is made up entirely of a male-on-male rape scene because that's all anyone ever talks about. It's because of that scene that when I say something like I wish I could play banjo, people say things like ewww and But I thought you were married.
The banjo also has another, but far lesser, negative connotation: the banjo is or should be enshrined in our national collective memories as a musical instrument that may or may not be a harbinger of marital infidelity: or have you forgotten that someone was in the kitchen with Dinah while you were workin' on the railroad-- and that someone was keepin' Dinah from blowin' her horn, and that someone was... that's right: strummin' on the ol' banjo.
So the banjo clearly has some image problems. That's too bad, because Duelin' Banjos is a great song. And the banjo is, in fact, a screamingly great instrument with a greater pedigree than people know. First of all, Steve Martin played the banjo, and Steve Martin is cool. Steve Martin is cool enough that he can do anything -- blow up balloon animals, play the banjo, make a movie with Queen Latifah -- and we love him. And he played the banjo, as you saw in that first Youtube there and as you can see here:
And he pointed out that the banjo is, in fact, a happy instrument. He said it best: You can't be sad when you hear a banjo. He had that song that he played: oh, death, and grief, and sorrow and murder, but he played it on the banjo and so it was a happy song.
Secondly of all, the banjo was the instrument that Kermit the Frog played, and he played it in the intro to The Muppet Movie, which someday will get its own nomination here, but for now let's focus on the banjo, which he played on the song The Rainbow Connection. I love Kermit, I loved that movie, and I love that song. I have the soundtrack. On cassette.
Thirdly of all, watching someone play a banjo, listening to someone play a banjo, is amazing. Those notes just fly off the banjo, plucked into the air and hopping around like popcorn kernels or fireflys, or fireflys that spring out of popcorn kernels and become musical notes that are somehow still fireflys. I can't even imagine how someone plays the banjo. Sometimes, on some of the faster songs I play, my hands get all tangled up, and Chariots of Fire starts to sound a lot like Michael, Row The Boat Ashore. (That never happens with pretend harmonica.)
Watch her hands, and listen to the notes:
Banjo players make my hands feel tangled when I'm just sitting there. I feel a sense of awe when I watch them. And that sense of awe is what led me to music in the first place -- when I was little, I saw a guy play piano on TV and thought that it looked phenomenal, the way his hands just danced over the keys. I wanted to learn that, learn how to make my hands dance over the keys, and produce music like that, too. The banjo is the highest form of that; if you can play banjo, your fingers will not just dance, they'll blur into another dimension, a dimension of pure happiness.
So let's get past the whole Deliverance thing, can we? If I can listen to banjo and not think of my older brother's painful rendering of the song Duelin' Banjos, then I'm sure the rest of you can listen to the banjo and not think of Ned Beatty, and maybe Dinah, gettin' some. We can just focus on the fact that cool people like Steve Martin and cool Muppets like Kermit play the banjo, and that the banjo is the happiest instrument around, and make the banjo cool again, and more people will learn to play it, and the world will be filled with banjo music.
And I will accompany them on pretend harmonica.
There are also: Nonfiction books about lame/cool topics., Or things like music that was brought back by the two greatest forces for social change in the world, Or things like movies your kids make you watch but which turn out to be pretty good because of the songs in them
And he pointed out that the banjo is, in fact, a happy instrument. He said it best: You can't be sad when you hear a banjo. He had that song that he played: oh, death, and grief, and sorrow and murder, but he played it on the banjo and so it was a happy song.
Secondly of all, the banjo was the instrument that Kermit the Frog played, and he played it in the intro to The Muppet Movie, which someday will get its own nomination here, but for now let's focus on the banjo, which he played on the song The Rainbow Connection. I love Kermit, I loved that movie, and I love that song. I have the soundtrack. On cassette.
Thirdly of all, watching someone play a banjo, listening to someone play a banjo, is amazing. Those notes just fly off the banjo, plucked into the air and hopping around like popcorn kernels or fireflys, or fireflys that spring out of popcorn kernels and become musical notes that are somehow still fireflys. I can't even imagine how someone plays the banjo. Sometimes, on some of the faster songs I play, my hands get all tangled up, and Chariots of Fire starts to sound a lot like Michael, Row The Boat Ashore. (That never happens with pretend harmonica.)
Watch her hands, and listen to the notes:
Banjo players make my hands feel tangled when I'm just sitting there. I feel a sense of awe when I watch them. And that sense of awe is what led me to music in the first place -- when I was little, I saw a guy play piano on TV and thought that it looked phenomenal, the way his hands just danced over the keys. I wanted to learn that, learn how to make my hands dance over the keys, and produce music like that, too. The banjo is the highest form of that; if you can play banjo, your fingers will not just dance, they'll blur into another dimension, a dimension of pure happiness.
So let's get past the whole Deliverance thing, can we? If I can listen to banjo and not think of my older brother's painful rendering of the song Duelin' Banjos, then I'm sure the rest of you can listen to the banjo and not think of Ned Beatty, and maybe Dinah, gettin' some. We can just focus on the fact that cool people like Steve Martin and cool Muppets like Kermit play the banjo, and that the banjo is the happiest instrument around, and make the banjo cool again, and more people will learn to play it, and the world will be filled with banjo music.
And I will accompany them on pretend harmonica.
There are also: Nonfiction books about lame/cool topics., Or things like music that was brought back by the two greatest forces for social change in the world, Or things like movies your kids make you watch but which turn out to be pretty good because of the songs in them
And including things like TV shows you wouldn't guess are so cool, guys who should be on TV more, superheroes who can't be gotten rid of, food that defies Newton's laws, this guy, places you can take the whole family and they'll actually have fun, and my ideal pet.
Oh, and this other guy, and a song you can't live without hearing.
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