As a break from the interminable Christina (*only* 22 episodes to go!), a life story instead:
Last weekend I was the guest on a traveling live radio show/musical event known as Radio8Ball that is run by SyncHeads. SyncHeads are a wide-ranging group born out of vaguely Jungian-9/11 conspiracy theory currents who make synchronicity the guiding principle of their lives. They follow the crumbs of coincidence through the forest of daily life and find meaning and direction in the accidental linkages. Actually they are kind of Surrealists without knowing it. A lot of them are musicians. They’ve put out a couple of books.
Radio8Ball has a live playlist of eight songs composed by whoever’s hosting, in this case a Berkeley musician named Ira Marlowe. Guest and 7 audience members take turns asking a question about their life, then randomly draw one of eight cards. The musician plays the song linked to that card, and you see what kind of answer you get. I asked, “Where am I in my life right now?” (maybe not quite as banal as it sounds) and the answer I got was a song called “Modern Times” with many appropriate lines.
The nicest part of the evening was Ira Marlowe. A singer composer no one ever heard of—I never heard of him even though I live in Berkeley—and he wasn’t bad, he was not bad at all. Best of all, he sang as if his life depended on it. Good or bad, that’s all that matters. Here are a couple of his songs.