Why is it that a woman sitting in a skirt with her legs crossed, precariously dangling a designer pump from her toe-tips, can keep me mesmerized for what has to be an unhealthy amount of time? There’s something about a delicate, perfectly arched foot cradling a red pump that sends my most dormant of hormones into an adolescent tizzy. Men could never pull this off. A guy dangling a wingtip from a foot draped in argyle has no aesthetic appeal whatsoever. Thermal socks and construction boots? An Air Jordan and an immaculately white pair of tube socks pulled up to the knees like Michael Cooper? Nu-uh.

I feel that this little game between foot and shoe carries with it a tantalizing aura of beauty. It’s perfect in its imperfection. What I mean is, a shoe is meant to cover the foot; it is meant to be worn. No one designs a shoe preoccupied with the thought of how it is going to look dangling from the end of a woman’s foot. There’s absolutely no utility in the cross-legged dangle, and yet I feel compelled to compare it to a work of art. I mean, I dig the drawings of Matisse. In fact, I have a print of his Study of A Model in my bedroom. There’s just something about it that injects solitary moments of contentment into my life. But if you were to put me in a room and tell me that I have to choose between spending an hour looking at a Matisse or an hour watching the cross-legged dangle, well…I think you know which way I’m going to go.

I used to wonder if women were aware of what they were doing when they played this little game. Were they aware that men watched this whole act with a keen and concentrated eye? Years ago, a trio of men and I stood by distracted and breathless as we watched a young woman sitting at a picnic table rhythmically do the cross-legged dangle. Like babies watching a musical mobile, we were entranced. I’m sure some of us were even drooling like babies. That’s what that little act can do to us. One of the guys later said that this woman knew we were watching all along and that the whole shoe dangling performance was just a deliberate attempt to turn us on. To which I replied, “Who cares?”

When I was fifteen I wanted to marry every woman who made even the slightest beautiful gesture. That included everything from using a napkin to lightly pat the perspiration from her neck and arms to gently pushing her wind tousled hair from her face. Tiny gestures such as those and I was envisioning what our kids would look like and in what quiet little hamlet our dream house would be. I don’t think like that kid anymore. I now know the beauty of sturdy relationships, of accustomed but beloved gestures, of spontaneity combined with familiarity. But that doesn’t mean that I can no longer recognize the beauty of those tiny gestures. I’m still gotten by the pat of perspiration and the brush of tousled hair. And I can still be drawn in for moments at a time by that lovely dangling shoe.

that I have a hard time letting things go. Someone can say something, and as flippant and innocuous as it may be, I oftentimes find myself gnawing on it mentally for days. Why is that? I think it’s partly due to my own little insecurities. Someone can say something completely off the cuff, most likely meaningless in their own minds, but three days later I sit and wonder, “What did she mean by that?” It’s enough to drive one crazy. How do you let that kind of stuff go?

Then I think of all the things I said or did preceding the statements that were made. Why did I say that? What was I thinking when I did that? I prompted that remark. It’s all my fault. And once it escapes from my lips, it’s gone. There’s no reeling it back in. Now I have to suffer with the consequences and wrangle with this new found vulnerability for days. Or at least until something else is said or done that will lead me down a completely new path of diffidence.

Sometimes I wish I could be like those assholes who speak their minds, completely unafraid, unfiltered and unaware that they are offending everyone or no one at all. It doesn’t register with them that their words could quietly devastate someone. They never take into account the fact that something they just said or done has, in someone’s eyes, turned them into a human skid mark (and I do mean of the doo doo kind). These people must sleep soundly at night while causing much tossing and turning among their peers.

I miss the days of no regret. In workplaces and relationships, phrases have to be carefully crafted so as not to foment the misery or ire of others. Nowadays, I have to wonder how something I said today will come back to haunt me one day in the near or distant future. “Remember when you said this to me?” “No.” “Well, you said it, and I carried that with me for a long time. And now I am going to destroy you with it.”

Crap.

Live 365, the site that hosts the Evening Melancholy radio station (basically pays all royalties for a fee), provides a Shout-Out link for all listeners of the station. That link allows the listener to contact the owner of the station and give kudos, criticisms, requests, etc.

Today I received a Shout-Out from someone in Japan. The email was written entirely in Japanese. Of course, I do not read Japanese, but when someone from Japan sends the owner of an internet radio station a note AND it is entirely in Japanese, the curiosity factor goes way up. So, I took the Japanese email and used one of the Japanese to English translators on the web in an attempt to decipher what the sender of the note was trying to convey. In short, the note said the following:

A friend of 30 years worries for renal cancer very much.
But a heart is healed very much when I listen to music of here.
Thank you

Nothing I do on a day to day basis at my regular job could ever crumble and thrill me like these few words have done. Repeatedly, I am able to connect with people all over the world simply because of this wonderful thing called music. We have these quiet moments during our life when it seems like all we have are the thoughts that haunt us and the music that soothes us. During those times, everything else disappears. What an elixir music can be.

40+ hours a week I spend just “living the dream”. I need the job. I need the paycheck. But I’m not kidding myself. This is not the dream. This is the crutch I must use until, hopefully, the real dream comes along.

I had intended on writing a lengthy blog about one of my favorite music producers (of any genre), Blockhead. Unfortunately, time has gotten away from me and weeks have passed since I first set fingertip to key on this topic. So I have decided instead to include my initial scribblings on the subject and leave it at that.

Anyway, you can also listen to my all-time favorite Blockhead song, The Strain (I probably listen to it at least three or four times a week), as well as Four Walls from his latest album “The Music Scene”. I’ve also included some of the songs that either influenced or were sampled in Blockhead’s music. Seems to me that any person who can seamlessly combine Johnny Preston’s Running Bear with a comedy bit by Nichols and May deserves a respectful nod and kudos. And because of Blockhead’s “Four Walls” — which uses the now loathed vocoder/autotune, although I still really like the song — I was introduced to Eddie Holman. Holman’s concise version of Four Walls is both haunting and instrumentally divine. It does in less than three minutes what most songs never come close to doing in twice that amount of time.

There’s a scene in the Michael Mann film Heat where the following words are spoken:

You sift through the detritus. You read the terrain. You search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That’s the only thing you’re committed to. The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through.

To me, these words (enviable writing, by the way) accurately describe DJ and producer Blockhead. I first encountered Blockhead’s production chops in the fall of 2001. The album was Labor Days, the rapper, Aesop Rock. I had a four hour plane ride from Nashville to San Diego and was so enthralled with the album, both lyrically and musically, that it turned out to be the only cd I listened to during the entire flight. In fact, I spent most of my drive time in San Diego listening to Labor Days over and over and over again, seriously knocked out by what I was hearing. I have been enthralled by Blockhead’s music ever since.

Sift through the detritus, read the terrain. People like to goof on sampling. Many think of it as nothing more than petty theft. But it takes a certain brilliance, a keen ear and a steady resolve to sift through thousands of records and extract a sound that fits perfectly the vision you have in your head. Now imagine taking a collection of sounds and producing such a unique amalgamation that the initial artistic expression is mutated and rendered damn near unrecognizable as an altogether new emotion is evoked. To me, this describes precisely the unique and peerless skill of Blockhead.