Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Beguine

One of the things I've done and felt good about was to imitate other people. There are some people, however, that it's not been alright to imitate them because it is considered impolite, and that's retards. I don't use that word lightly. Especially when it's been applied to me infrequently all of my life. I'd be willing bet, if the truth could be known, that most people have been accused of being a retard more often than is comfortable.

Today I realized that I could not only dance inside my house and out on the decks and stairs, but i can dance all over my yard too, because nobody can see in here from the paved road. I'm surrounded by my family's properties and the woods and underbrush, and literally... truly... nobody knows. My family already knows I'm crazy. they brag about it sometime. As if to express gratitude that it's me instead of them. No blame.

I stumbled out on to my lawn and swirled and twirled like a maniac. I walked around my house backwards and spun around in circles until i almost fell down. Then, I started walking like a retard and screwing up my face like that grinning idiot piano player with the yellow jackets band, and it felt just great. Some things do happen when I hold my mouth just right. I ain't here just to display the right faces to all the right people. Who decides who that might be?

I did all this crazy stuff to the rhythm of drumbeat #092 Beguine. Well, that's what the LED readout says it's called. I'm familiar with an old Forty's song labeled Begin The Beguine. I never knew what that meant. After seeing this drum beat called Beguine I figured maybe it was the name of some exotic South American dance. I got curious and Googled it up. Nope. Not even close.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine

Some weird Catholic religious cult back in the Thirteen Hundreds that had something to do with the Crusades. The legitimate church didn't approve, so they just killed them and let God sort it out. Typical Papist response. It's a fairly interesting read though. The world was a different place back in those days, much less a thousand or two years ere that. Certain human careactoristics were quelled, and if you didn't accept the rules of conscience the ruling majority provided for you, then you either went to live some place else or got dead. I don't think death meant that much until some wackos started making something of it.

Why Yamaha thought this drum beat should be called Beguine is beyond me. All I know is that i like it. I pick out parts of it and play them on my Djembe drum, and listen to the parts I'm not playing, and they seem to take on a different meaning. Then, I stop playing that part and take up another, and listen to what I just played and to what I haven't played yet, and at the end of this round-robin I can hear all the individual parts together.

There are four instruments and the continuous jangle of cymbals being played with brush sticks. It's digital perfect. Over and over. Never missing a stroke. Never adding a stroke. I'll never be that way, but it's cute to have such a model to compare what I do against. It's fun to try to play it perfectly like the computer does, yet, all the while knowing it's not going to happen.