Trumpet

Further and further I push it along. I say what I feel lately, and it's been making people unhappy. Last night on the rooftop I met Stewart from across the hall. I was trying to get a good sound out of my trumpet. I have felt for a long time that I have lots of music in my head. If I can train myself to be able to extend that part of my psyche through an instrument, I will be able to learn something about myself. I will see parts of life from a different perspective, as well.. music is a very magical ritual that people conduct. Different cultures independently develop their own musical systems. It's a sort of communion of society. Isn't it strange though that it's almost instinctive? Depending on how you want to define music, I would suspect that some animals also use music in their experiences to communicate or do whatever it is that music does to a being.

Some say that Drum and Bass makes corn grow faster. I choose to believe that it has more to do with the heavy bass lines and vibration stimulating cellulose fibers and loosening them up to move and expand more easily rather than believe the notion that the corn is really into the syrupy matrices of percussion in good Drum and Bass.

Several times I have been struck with the curiosity to know what the oldest known written music in the world is. For some reason, I never remembered to find out. It seems there are some 3,400 year old tablets that some weirdo in Berkeley was playing with contain notation for music. I had a listen to the MIDI and have a feeling that it may not have sounded quite like the linked file.

Coincidentally, I was watching the Twilight Zone while killing time yesterday, and there was a chapter where this guy, Joe C---- something.. well, he was a trumpet player and he had been playing for a long time. Things weren't going his way though, and he had begun drinking. He drank because he was a nobody and he lived in a one-room apt. with dirty walls and cracked pipes, and because he didn't have a girlfriend and because he was a nobody. He said that when he drank he didn't see the dirt on the walls, and that he didn't care about anything. He wanted to play with one of his old pals, but he was horrible when he was on the sauce, so they told him no way.

Joe went on about heaven and how Gabriel has a trumpet made out of gold, and how Joe would play the trumpet so that beauty came out of it, the smell of summer flowers, just absolute acoustic beauty. After that dialogue, Joe went to the pawn shop and sold his trumpet for 8 and a half dollars. (This was like 1960 I think) The pawnbroker put the trumpet in the window for 25 dollars, and Joe felt beat. Then he sort of died, walking away from the window he got hit by a truck. After establishing that he was dead, he met up with Gabriel, who let him have a play on his trumpet. I love the twilight zone. Then Gabriel sort of encouraged him to appreciate life and his music a bit more. Joe went back, and made it.. and bought his trumpet back. Then he was playing on a rooftop in NYC and somehow (I stopped paying attention for a minute) a girl ended up on the roof. He was getting excited about going to go see jazz somewhere.