#i don't make a racket when i come home and i don't go elsewhere if we have plans together

[lachrymimosaa]

can't tell if a behavior is generally considered controlling or if i'm just so private a person that it's merely rubbing me as controlling

[desertdragon]

39. — secret

DA LIST | TW: Xenophobia

The water made her shiver as she wiped her face. Her cheeks still burned at the touch of cold and the slightest breeze. Gritting her teeth, she kept her back turned as everyone checked their weapons and gathered elsewhere to fill water skins. Their chatter buzzed swathing the room in noise; she finally let herself wince. A glance around and she sighed quietly, no one saw her.

Without thinking she ran her fingers just below her eyes then pulled away. The ink wouldn't come off, her tattoos were real. That giddy pride making her head spin and chest swell at last night's feast sank into a familiar pit. The kind that made her the sand it took down with it. She slapped her cheeks, eating the pain and feeling awake. This time she didn't wince. Now she just had to move. By some miracle there was an empty bench against a corner and grabbing her spear she sat.

Her spear blade needed oil and a second pass on a whetstone. The yarzon claw wore a dull brown on its flat sides and its edge did better on wild sage than flesh. She knew, she'd tested as much the day it'd been handed to her. Her sisters joked she may as well help them tenderize the drake meat for dinner, if she wanted to make such a racket. She gripped the haft till her knuckles whitened.

With a spear this garbage she'd be dinner. The crafters would never dare play this joke on anyone else. Not even if they were arguing a second before. Well, everyone else got to be everyone else, not a her.

"Rala! There you are, why the sour face?"

"Must be nervous, obviously. You can be so clueless Rahtalo."

"Thulani you're not helping." Rahtalo hissed.

Her sister rubbed her shoulder and gave her a smile. Weakly she tried throwing one back. Rahtalo sighed and Thulani crossed her arms.

"It's a little scary... everyone's been doing this the way they always have. I could screw it up and catch us nothing."

They sat next to her one on each side, glaring at any annoyed stares they got. Thulani nudged her.

"When I did my first hunt I jumped too high going for the sandworm's head. My knuckle blades ended up glancing off its face spines! Guess where I landed. Right into quicksand!"

"I remember! By Azyema you almost killed U'ralka on the spot when she heard."

"And my back having to help pull you out." Rahtalo chimed.

"Oh hush you weren't doing it alone. Father laughed, so I won."

"Don't listen to her Ralhana or you'll end up the same way. A rock for a head."

Her sisters glared at each other pretending to get mad; the times they did yell she could count on her hand. Slowly, softly, she started giggling. They smiled.

"We've both won now I guess." Thulani said.

From the corner of her eye she saw a few spiteful glances. Her laugh cut short. She controlled herself again. Instead she sat straighter, staring into her lap.

"Don't mind them you hear? Not ever."

Then U'ralka stood at the doorway with a bow slung on her shoulder. Her quiver hung from her belt decorated with bone figures carved off successful kills. The etched sun of Azyema on its leather drew stares. Her eyes burned fierce glinting in the rising dawn light. Everyone stood to follow, waiting the order sharing the same breath.

"Enough preparations hunters! We chase the worm this day. Should you be separated you will find your way home. Slackers have no place among us. Let us depart!"

Her sisters ruffled her hair and went ahead. Gripping it one last time she carried her spear tip down, moving carefully at the rear. People started whispering, bumping her in trying to walk past as if she were air instead. It was always her strange blue hair, or her green eyes. It was her outsider mother, who'd only done her the favor of allowing her to slither out the womb. If her father payed that woman enough attention while ignoring his harem, if she then abandoned the child he gave her, what was that if not a bad omen?

She had no idea what her mother looked like. And maybe the pitying looks Father gave her here and there meant she shouldn't ask. Maybe she shouldn't care. In the end she'd never be part of everyone else if someone could say so. That was the one thing her older sisters would never understand; their mothers were normal.

And she could never tell them.

[dreamsister81]

 Jeff and MI:

By age, you fit in the G.I.T generation, but you obviously are not one of them...

These facilities are a mystery to me. There they tell you only one thing: hurry up! This leads you nowhere, afterwards your own children run away from you. Through these trainings you get to know women, you get to know men, music is inoculated into people who have no feeling for it; then they can only scare other people or insult them...

I was in this terrible place too, by the way-G.I.T That was a complete waste of time, apart from the theoretical lessons and the friends that I had there. Otherwise: an absolute wrong decision.

How long have you studied there?

One year, the normal program. They give you tons of material, you have to absorb everything, you practice, you are tested and you go to the next course. An intensive support with development is simply not possible. I did so many things: theory, single string technique, jazz class, rock class, all sorts of genres. My friend John was teaching bass there, and he once said that there is not a single teacher at the institute who says to the students, "OK, you're learning all this stuff here now, you're learning how to entertain people and you're learning to learn. But do you even know that there is no one in the universe other than yourself who plays the music you play? " John left the school then. For me it was all a joke that cost me $ 3,900. People interested in music should take private lessons somewhere, start a band, do something with people who like them and have what it takes. These schools are a scene in their own right, a very small, secluded world-the music, on the other hand, is gigantic and open. If you don't notice it, you miss a lot of magic, pain, development...(thinks) and rock! Apart from Paul Gilbert, there was no one there who really rocked. Session musicians are bred there; and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper that says, "Now you have the skills to become a professional musician." Well, congratulations! And then you look for jobs and play what other people want. But that's not all the music, there's something else isn't there? Where's the music coming from? From your own head or stomach, or the concepts of the people you work for?-Gitarre & Bass, October,  1995

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I had a friend named John Humphrey. I went to this really crappy guitar school for a year, and he used to teach there, he was a bass teacher. And then he left, and we ended up being roommates later on, after I graduated. This is the kind of school where you give them a shitload of money in order to spend a year learning their curriculum.

What was it, G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles)?

Yeah, it was G.I.T.. They give you their curriculum, and it's not too comprehensive, but it's just enough, and then you can [snaps his fingers] move on to the next thing. And pretty soon you have all this shit inside you and then they give you this paper that says you have what it takes to be a professional musician.

It's a rock-oriented thing, isn't it?

In the end, I think, the only true product of that kind of learning is to get you gigs on the studio circuit and to get you gigs on the session guy circuit.

So, Lee Ritenour went there or something?

G.I.T. was started by Howard Roberts, the guy who played the wah-wah guitar on the theme to Shaft. And this other guy named Pat Hayes. I don't know. It just seemed like a racket, really. John said a lot of things to me that stuck in my mind. He said that there was nobody who stopped you, sat you in a room and said, okay, we have all these artists that you're learning the licks from, you have your guitar heroes, your virtuoso lust objects. But there's nobody who can make the kind of music you can make now except for you. And you can make it now. You don't even have to know how to go fast. And that makes all the sense to me in the world. It's also kind of an unseen process, that concept, originality. It's like that in all the education systems; there's never any real...identity education, self-generative identity art sort of thing, to be yourself. If everybody in Melbourne had a Wurlitzer organ and had the passion to sing something or make something, you'd have hundreds of thousands of different styles, if they were coming exactly from only their DNA, only their makeup, and their emotional percepts, their idea about what art is. You could have way-removed genres from what is already accepted, avante-garde country-rock-punk-folk-whatever. It's unlimited. But for some reason, the conventions always take over and there's a very ready and powerful formula to step into...

Those are the type of [formula-derived] players who can say, "Well, I was listening to the radio in 1967 and I heard the guitar solo in Jimi Hendrix's 'All Along the Watchtower,' and that guitar sound, that tone, would work perfectly for this television commercial."

Yeah. See? "Stealing from the greats, that's okay." That's right. Once I stopped in [at G.I.T.] years later, when I was on tour going through L.A., just to see what it was like. They've got a completely high-tech, multi-million dollar facility...

More so than when you had been there?

Way more. When I was there, it was just a ragtag bunch of teachers, and they had all left by then. They had video facilities and a class for stage moves and all kinds of things. And I saw this guy who was working the desk, the guy who watches the door. He had a bass on, and he was practicing his Nirvana chops! He was playing "In Bloom" on his bass, way up on his chest, jazz-fusion style, to the Nirvana song. I thought, oh shit--he was practicing his grunge riffs! He was getting his grunge down! Best fucking thing you can do, if you have the interest, is go to a private teacher, go someplace, some college, and learn theory. That was something I really enjoyed, actually, something that wasn't totally pointless. Theory meaning the meaning of the musical nomenclature. I was attracted to really interesting harmonies, stuff that I would hear in Ravel, Ellington, Bartok.-Double Take, February 29, 1996

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Once the site of a seakeasy and a bra factory, the 30,000-square-foot quarters were now the home of Musicians Institute, a vocational school for anyone who considered himself or herself a serious musician. With its wooden desks and chipped-tile hallways, MI resembled any other urban school, but at those desks, student guitarists and drummers studied scales and power chords in hopes of becoming the next Eddie Van Halen or Neil Peart, the flashy drummer with Rush. On their way to class each morning, flaxen-haired guitar gods in training could be spotted holding their guitars and practicing licks as they walked down Hollywood Boulevard.

Jeff had heard about Musicians Institute (and its subdivision, the Guitar Institute of Technology) while in high school and told everyone it was his one and only destination. However, potential superstardom did not run cheap. The school charged $4,000 for its one year course, and by the time Jeff Graduated from Loara High School, Mary Guibert was beginning to fall on hard financial times as she went in and out of jobs. In need of money for herself and her two sons, she prematurely broke into a $20,000 fund earmarked for Jeff, but only after he tured nineteen. Once Mary proved to the courtsthat Jeff needed it for his education, he and Mary received it a year early. In a deep irony, the father Jeff had barely met and increasingly resented would be paying his son's way through music school.

On graduation night, September 15, 1985, at the Odyssey in Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley, Jeff, Stoll, and Marryatt closed the ceremony by playing Weather Report's "Pearl On the Half Shell."-from Dream Brother

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With its 30-odd thousand feet of floor space and row upon row of "labs", where hopeful guitar heroes could jam with such shit-hot players as Scott Henderson, LA's Musician's Institute must have seemed like nirvana for someone like Jeff Buckley, trapped as he was behind the Orange Curtain. According to his buddy Chris Dowd, that's exactly why Buckley enrolled there, arriving just before autumn, 1984, bankrolled by $4,000 that Mary managed to squeeze from a Tim Buckley trust fund.

Originally known as the Guitar Institute, which in itself says plenty, the school was opened in 1977. Drawing on the educational philosophy of journeyman guitarist Howard Roberts, it was co-founded and managed by Los Angeles music businessman Pat Hicks, "a real shyster opportunist", in the words of Tom Chang, an expat Canadian who would become very tight with Jeff Buckley during their two years at the Institute. In 1978, thr Bass Institute was opened, followed by the Percussion Institute two years later. Desppite Hicks' questionable business ethics-amongst other things, he'd hire students as cheap labour to do essential maintenance work on the building, which led to Buckley being hired as an electrician's assistant soon after graduating-he did manage to persuade well regarded players and bands to lecture, and play alongside, the hopefuls who'd enrolled there.

What Buckley lacked up in "front" he clearly made up for in ambition. That was proved, in spades, by Buckley's graduation performance which was played out on September 15, 1985, at a venue called the Odyssey in Granada Hills. While the sonic crush and enviable chops of Rush and Led Zeppelin still rocked the world of this Orange County teen, Buckley had also developed a real taste for such "noodlers" as Weather Report.

The number chosen by Buckley for graduation was their "D Flat Waltz" (not "Pearl On The Half-Shell", as documented elsewhere, which they'd performed at a previous event), a typically complicated few minutes of Weather Report neo-fusion-a "really cool piece, very involved", according to Tom Chang-and a standout from their 1983 set Domino Theory. But Buckley, accompanied by Stoll on drums and Marryatt on bass, didn't just play the piece, he also wrote the individual parts out beforehand for the band.-from A Pure Drop

MI pics by me