Instrumental

“Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
– Samuel Butler

It’s been just less than two weeks since I bought a nylon-string classical guitar as a Chanukah gift to myself. And, in that time, I’ve been busily practicing away, enough that small callouses have begun to form on the tips of my left-hand fingers.

During the first week, I dutifully worked my way through introductory etudes and exercises, eventually reaching the point that I could play something resembling Au Clair De La Lune at barely lumbering speed.

Then, last weekend, thumbing through the back of the method book, I discovered a transcription of Packington’s Pound. I knew the song from Julian Bream’s The Woods So Wild, a classical lute record I loved so much as a child that I made my parents play it for me nightly as I fell asleep. Though Packington’s Pound was clearly well beyond my exceedingly limited guitar abilities, I set to work, beat by beat, trying to figure it out.

Through the weekend, I couldn’t play even a single full measure. But, by Wednesday, much to my own surprise, I found I could strum a fairly good likeness of the entire piece. I turned back to the front of the book, and the earlier etudes that had dogged me just one week before seemed effortlessly easy. Apparently, by throwing myself into musical depths way above my head, by painfully but consistently muddling through, I made progress far faster than I would have by taking the more sensible, incremental approach.

And, looking back on 2005, looking back over the last few years, I see that same approach borne out through nearly all of my life. In work and play, love and friendship, I’ve drank direct from the fire hose. I’ve made mistakes, of such number and magnitude that I can no longer keep track. And I’ve learned far more in the process than someone of 26 years has any right.

So, to those I’ve hurt, offended or wronged, my sincere apologies. I think, at least, that I can promise I won’t do it again in the same way, that I won’t make the same mistakes twice. But, at the same time, I’ll be spending 2006 swimming into deeper waters still. Preemptive apologies for the whole new collection of mistakes I’ll doubtless find my way to pioneer throughout this coming year.

Sure, jumping in head-first isn’t the easiest way to do things, but it’s the best I’ve found so far. Time to take another year’s worth of leaps.
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For the past three or four days, I’ve been working on another far-too-difficult-for-me guitar piece, Snowflight, from Andrew York’s beautiful suite The 8 Discernments. While I have an exceedingly long way to go on figuring out how toplay it well, this morning I recorded a quick MP3 of my muddling through. Enjoy:

Snowflight, performed by Joshua Newman

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Stuff It

If it’s Christmas, it’s also annual ‘sinuses full of snot week’, a joyous holiday marked with much tissue usage and the consumption of bowl after bowl of chicken soup.

I’m celebrating thusly myself, and have noted that friends around the blogosphere are sharing in the fun as well. So, to everyone colded, flued, or sinus infectioned, take solace in the collective nature of our pain. Misery, as they say, loves company.

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Merry Christmas

I would have titled this post ‘happy holidays’, but I don’t need the War on Christmas again pegged on us Jews (as it was by Henry Ford).

Besides, today, for the first time since 1929, Christmas day and the first night of Chanukah coincide.

So, everyone should be in the holday spirit. [Aside from Muslisms, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, atheists, agnostics and Pastafarians. But I digress.]

Enjoy your eggnog, fire up some latkes, light the menorah and tinsel the tree. Best wishes to all my friends in Cyberspace,

joshua

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Holiday Hodgepodge

Following the last post, logging Underground in my living room kept going, and going, and going. We’re still not quite done, but as Colin is off to Michigan through New Year’s, I at least have a two week reprieve.

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Just in time, too, as my parents are now in town, availing themselves of the Joshua Newman Hotel. Replete with mints on the pillow.

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And replete with soothing lounge music.

Or, with not-so-soothing-half-assed-attempts at lounge music. Keeping alive my great-grandmother’s tradition of buying herself a Chanukah present (so she’d be sure to receive at least one gift she really wanted), I headed out to Sam Ash Music, picked up an inexpensive Yamaha CG-111S classical guitar, and set back upon my earlier mission to become the next AndrÈs Segovia. As I haven’t played since moving out from my prior, guitar-owning roommates a year back, I may hold off a bit before booking my Carnegie Hall debut.

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Also, I think there was a transit strike here or something.

As Cyan / Long Tail is moving in to the Actor’s Equity Building, on the corner of 46th and Broadway and a scant five blocks from my apartment, I wouldn’t know.

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Lest I gloat too much, I should point out the new commute, while just five blocks, passes directly up Times Square, and therefore consists of perhaps the five crappiest blocks in all of New York City.

Seriously, I should start taking horse tranquilizers before setting out in either direction.

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I was happy to head just a few blocks up from there, however, to pick up a quart of pickles at the Carnegie Deli. A guy in Boston had posted on Ask Metafilter to say how much his wife loved those pickles, and to see if there was a New Yorker who’d be willing to purchase some on his behalf, then overnight them up to Boston in time to make a truly excellent surprise Christmas gift.

As a pickle-lover myself, and having, while still living in California, once similarly been on the receiving end of a pickle package sent from Gus’s by my grandmother, I had no choice but to play good briny Samaritan.

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And, finally, the New York Times name-checked me at the end of an article about fitness ‘cult’ CrossFit, whose New York branch I help run.

It’s not the best researched or most accurate article, and kind of makes us all sound like a bunch of masochistic wack-jobs, but it could have been worse. At least, as a result of the article, I’ve been getting emails all day from New Yorkers interested in joining the CrossFit fray.

If your New Year’s resolutions include kicking your lard ass into shape, you should be to.

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Log Roll

While most people realize – at least in the odd moments they give it thought – that the reality of filmmaking is far less glamorous than the ideal, they still tend to underestimate wildly the sheer, endless tedium that underlies much of the movie-making process.

This weekend, for example, nearly twelve hours each on Saturday and Sunday, I sat in my living room with Colin Spoelman, logging footage for Underground, the Kentucky-set, lost-in-a-cave thriller he recently wrote and directed.

Logging, essentially, is the process of transferring video from DV tapes to massive harddrive, of notating, scene by scene, what’s on those tapes and which parts of which scenes work, and of otherwise setting things up to pass a film along to its editor.

We ended up in my living room largely because I was equipped with the two key tools for logging: a fast computer running Final Cut HD, and large quantities of Woodford Reserve Bourbon Whiskey.

By now, it may just be the Bourbon talking, but even after twenty-some hours of watching it roll past, the footage Colin got looks really, really good.

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Do It Yourself

Four years ago, I bought a 42 inch plasma TV. At that point, plasmas were still wildly expensive, but Gateway had just inexplicably stepped into the space, and was selling one for literally thousands and thousands of dollars less than any competitor.

Beyond the cheap price, I was able to write off the entire purchase (hooray, running a film company!). So, I picked one up, and for the last four years, a giant flat screen has dominated my living room.

A few weeks back, however, that TV stopped working. It would power on and back off again, cycling endlessly. I called Gateway, who had long since given up on manufacturing TV’s, and was told that the outsourced repair would cost $800, plus parts.

So, in standard idiotic style, realizing I could buy a whole new TV for not much more, and realizing that, despite the impressive size, the TV kind of sucked, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

By now, I have a lot of parts of a 42 inch plasma TV. All strewn across my living room floor. And, when I plug in the largest, screen-containing, chunk, it still endlessly powers on and back off again.

Crap.

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Note to Self

One of Long Tail’s investors just doubled down on our second round; after his wire hit, he sent along this email, summarizing the secret of entrepreneurial success in five sentences:

Stay focused and attack your plan. We grew from $3 million to $165 million in sales over 15 years. Step by step. Intense focus. Blocking and tackling, innovating, executing.

I know you can make it happen.

best,

Mike

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Valuing Friends

As told by Leo McGarry to Josh Lyman, on The West Wing:

This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out.

A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

“Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

“Then a friend walks by. ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

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Critical Genius

“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark – that is critical genius.”
– Billy Wilder

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Come Here Often?

Speaking of alone and bored, it occurred to me recently that I haven’t been on a real date since I broke up with Abigail this summer. Which, as long-standing readers will doubtless note, flies in the face of both prior practice and (admittedly somewhat deserved) reputation.

It’s just that, with so much going on, with so much time spent out of town, with not more than single-week stretches at home since mid-summer, I simply haven’t had the chance to disastrously sleep my way through New York City.

Tragic, I know, and doubtless deleterious to the content of this site. So, spurred on by necessity, I headed back to Nerve, the only dating site I’ve ever used. (And even then, just once – the first email I sent locked a date that kicked off an [uncharacteristically long] seven-month relationship.)

Then, as Nerve has apparently started sucking, I also headed off to JDate (are you happy Mom?) and Consumating (where I has apparently registered a year back when the site was brand new, and had since been tagged ‘beautiful’ and ‘misanthrope’, the second half of which, at least, is probably right).

I’ll therefore, again, shortly be heading out into the fray of New York single life. Wish me luck, and remind me to wear my bean-proof shirt.

[Also: Hi, potential dates who have Google-stalked me back to this site! Don’t worry, I’d never write about you! Okay, that’s not true. But I at least promise I won’t use your name!]

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