For complicated reasons involving hotel no-vacancies, my only room option last week was on the other side of the machinery at the top of the elevator shaft. If you can imagine the sound of enormous carts rolling across bumpy pavement every ten to twenty seconds, you’ll have an idea of what it sounded like.

But it was either than or hump over to another hotel at at 11 p.m., so I took the room. I even fell asleep at a decent hour.

Then I woke up. It was about 3:30 a.m. The elevators were pretty quiet, but a green light was flashing from overhead every five seconds or so.

And I was hot. I tried to adjust the thermostat, but every single knob was missing. Luckily, I guess, it was preset for a decent temperature. I flipped back the fancy down comforter, which would have kept Nanook warm in the north, and went with a complicated thermal solution that involved wearing a long sleeve t-shirt under the sheet.

And then the elevators started to rumble again. I lay in bed for a while, then remembered I had a solution for the sound:

Those things that look like bullets are actually foam ear plugs. I’d forgotten I had them, but necessity is apparently a great spur for your memory. I put the ear plugs in, and there was much rejoicing. You can buy them at any drugstore. They pencil out to about 10 cents apiece. Trust me: a pair of those in your suitcase is money well spent.

But there was still a flashing green light above my head, and I needed a fix for it. A piece of tape would have been perfect, but I didn’t have tape (I am not, you know MacGuyver). I took a look at the light sources, which was a smoke alarm of some sort. 

After some casting about for suitable material, I realized the cardboard key sleeve that the hotel provides could be shimmed into the alarm on either side of the light, creating a barrier. Even better, the sleeve was printed in a dark color on one side, letting less light through.

I was proud of that hack … and it was probably for the best I didn’t see the mold around the smoke alarm (yeesh!) until I downloaded my photo a few days later.

So I managed to outwit the elevator, the balky air conditioner, and the green light — yet I still lost out on sleep, because I had to do major surgery on the hotel room in the middle of the night.

If you can help it, don’t travel for business.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two points about THE HOUSE OF SILK (and the notion of writing a Sherlock Holmes story in general):

1. Sherlock has been done so many times, especially recently, that the character is basically a cut-out. You prop it up, and substitute whoever you like, be it Robert Downey Jr. or Benedict Cumberbatch.
2. That said, the author (in this case, Anthony Horowitz) is in a slightly odd position. Because everyone is so familiar with Holmes, all his characterization feels like a retread. I almost skimmed over those parts … keen intellect, yeah yeah … stunning deductions … yeah, been there.

That said, Horowitz tells a good tale, weaving orphaned children, immigrants, a man apparently threatened by an Irish gangster, and the nefarious doings of well-to-do into a story with a bunch of twists and turns that he ties together in a way that is both surprising and satisfying.

He also writes well. It isn’t just good prose, but he adds period detail with his use of language, especially anachronistic terms.

It’s not the kind of book that I’d expect to see shortlisted for the Booker, but it’s a good story, a fun read, and moves along at a lively pace.

View all my reviews

I managed to catch a set by the Rich Halley Group, which was neat. Halley, a saxophonist, played with a trombonist, bassist, and drummer. I’m not usually a big fan of really free jazz, but I found it was a lot more approachable when I could see the musicians cue off of each other.

But the real reason I was there had to do with the headliner: David Haney was playing with bassist Andre St. James, and a drummer named Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. As a drummer, I’ve been a fan for a long time — I’ve been listening to tracks he’s recorded for most of my life (I’ll bet you have, too. Check out a list of his top 100 tracks.) But I’ve never seen him live.

The trio was great. Haney actually took the stage wearing a winter coat, a sport coat, and a scarf, like a commuter on the bus. But Haney plays piano unlike almost anyone I’ve ever seen — his right foot taps, his legs kick out, and he lurches around on the bench. If there’s such a thing as a physical piano player, he is one. All that motion warmed him up, and he took off the jacket, then peeled off the sport coat during a song. One song later, the scarf joined the jacket and the coat on the floor next to the piano. It was like the dance of the seven veils.

As good as Haney and St. James are, I was mostly focused on Purdie. For the most part he was just comping, and didn’t even solo. But even compared to the drummer that preceded him, Purdie was smoother, his time was perfect, and his dynamics (variation in volume) were just effortless. He was so technically adept that when he was playing a fill, his hands would just bring his idea to life.

Purdie is now 73, so I’m feeling lucky that he came out one night to help out his friend’s jazz festival. I can only hope he decides to do it more often.

“The Grizz” is a cluster-bomb of breakfasts: Two strips of bacon, two sausage links, a ham steak, three eggs, hash brown potatoes, and two pancakes. According to the calculus of my stomach, that’s three breakfasts, not one.

Needless to say, news of the distant cousin’s failure to summit Mt. Grizz naturally became a bit of family lore. The Grizz was no longer just an expensive breakfast menu item — it had acquired a bit of myth.

So this morning, my older son said he wanted to order it. My son is thirteen, and struggles to fill out slim-fit jeans.

I said no. It was too much food, it was expensive, and I hated to see food and money go to waste. My son kept after it: “I’m hungry.” “I can finish it.” Etc. Then my younger son waded into the fray, offering to help. I countered with, “Why don’t you two share it?”

They had the uni-mind on this one, so they vetoed that motion. Son 1 wanted The Grizz. Son 2 wanted to see Son 1 eat it.

I agreed, on the condition that he had to finish it. I also decided to document things, thinking that if things went sideways (or came back up),  I’d have digital proof of his folly.

When our food arrived, we tucked in. Son 1 knocked off the three eggs, over-easy. And the bacon. And the sausage. And the ham. And then the pancakes. Then, slowing down noticeably and drinking plenty of water, he went after the hash browns. A few bites from the end, I was ready to give it to him, on rounding error.

He shook me off. He was hell-bent to conquer.

Which he did. Remarkably, we did not have to go directly to the drug store for Pepto-Bismol, or Alka-Seltzer. He didn’t want to go jump on a trampoline, but he was otherwise fine.

I’m just hoping this doesn’t become a habit.

But one thing the movie has, which the book doesn’t, is a subplot involving Beane’s 12-year-old daughter. In the movie the daughter sings and plays guitar, and the song she writes becomes kind of an anthem for her father.

The song, called “The Show,”  was actually written by a singer-songwriter named Lenka and released in 2008. Here’s Kerris Dorsey’s cover (she’s the actress who plays the daughter), in a video that looks like a trailer for the movie:

Lovely song, eh? But since I’m a hobbyist musician, I spend a lot of time listening to music, and I thought it sounded familiar. Like, really familiar. Like, substitute-other-lyrics-on-top-of-existing-song familiar.

Which existing song? “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz (first released in 2005):

I took a look at the chords, and they’re not the same (though I think they’re both using variations on the I-IV-V chord progressions). Then I compared the first two lines:

“The Show”:

I’m just a little bit caught in the middle
Life is a maze and love is a riddle

“I’m Yours”"

Well uh you dawned on me and you bet I felt it,
I tried to be chill but you’re so hot that I melted,

Similar number of syllables, similar meter. You could easily sing those four lines as a single verse.

Hmm.

But damn, that’s a lot of words. If you do the math — and this is one time when writers will — it works out to 1,667 words a day. That’s about seven pages a day, for 30 straight days.

I don’t expect to “win.” I’ve got a full-time job, as well as a part-time job as a dad/husband/dish-doer/errand-runner/math-homework-helper.

Also, I’ve tried not sleeping. It hasn’t worked out too well. I’d also like have my wife not divorce me.

So why go through all the trouble? Because it’s there! Also because I’ve been dipping my toe in a new project, and this gives me the institutional excuse to dive into the deep end. And because the things I regret are usually things I said no to.

Besides, writing is easy! As Gene Folwer (or someone else) once said, “All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

So, starting in 90 minutes, it’s November. And I’ll be cranking.

PS – You can see my progress on the widget on the right (because I know you have nothing better to do). And should it come to pass, I expect the widget will also show my lack of progress.

If you want to know more, check out their site. Or Nathan Bransford’s post about NaNoWriMo resources.

I thought that was a good comment, so I put it on Twitter. After dinner I was helping him with his math homework, and I peeked at my Twitter mentions. His comment had been retweeted twice, and someone responded by saying, “That would require ‘The Donald’ to have a soul.” My son thought that being retweeted was kind of cool.

But things were just getting started.

Over the next hour the mentions flowed in, as did the retweets. They kept coming. And coming … for the next two hours. Then it looked something like this:

Over 450 people had repeated it. Needless to say, he was really excited, even though he didn’t fully understand the dynamics of social media (or really, why his well-meaning comment about philanthropy had struck like a well-timed bolt of lightning).

But it made him happy. And I liked it when the commentariat started including Donald Trump’s Twitter address in responses and asking, “Well, how about it?”

As a former English instructor, I’d like to think this is empowering for him: that a good message will cut through all the noise, that it’s worth speaking up … that he might even affect change.

Will that happen? Hard to say. I think the tweet struck a chord because people were fed up with Trump’s grandstanding that if President Obama released his college transcripts, Trump would donate $5 million to the charity of Obama’s choice. It’s a gambit that looks particularly awkward, now that New York and surround states are facing billions in damages. Then again, about 10 percent of the mentions thought Obama should comply; apparently they were more concerned with how Obama did in college than they are about Hurricane Sandy wreaking havoc on the eastern U.S.

But you never know. Two hours after my son’s comment was out in the world, someone sent me a message that they had started a group on Facebook, called Donald Trump Should Donate His $5 Million to the Red Cross:

Can you see that first post? That’s the part that made me happy.

In a sense, The Wrecking Crew were never supposed to be the subject of a documentary, or of a book by Ken Hartman that came out this year. They were union musicians, hired to lay down tracks, and their work was never credited on singles or albums.

Which, to the record labels, made a certain kind of sense. They probably feared what the public would think if they learned that the same few dozen musicians recorded songs for the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Sonny and Cher, Jan & Dean, The Monkees, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Mamas and Papas, Tijuana Brass, Ricky Nelson, Johnny Rivers, and comprised Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound.

The Wrecking Crew in studio. Hal Blaine is on the drums. Carol Kaye is on the left, wearing white glasses and holding a bass.

Back in the early 1960s, a lot of groups became famous before they could actually play. Wikipedia says that members of the Wrecking Crew played on the first Byrds single recording, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, because Columbia Records didn’t trust the skills of Byrd musicians except for Roger McGuinn.

At the time, no one outside of other musicians probably cared about who played what (unlike jazz stations, which often credit every musician on a track). But now it’s a great story: These guys (and Carol Kaye, a bassist) were the core of a hit factory that included scores of number-one songs, and songs that won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. (Here’s a list of the songs.)

How good were they? A New York Times review of Ken Hartman’s book has two anecdotes: Once, with only three minutes’ worth of studio time available, “they played a first-take, no-glitch version of ‘The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.’ As Roy Halee, Simon and Garfunkel’s engineer and co-producer, once said of a top Wrecking Crew bassist: ‘You never have to stop the tape because of a mistake by Joe Osborn. There just aren’t any.’”

The movie’s director, Denny Tedesco (son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco), made the movie to tell his dad’s story — Guitar Player magazine once called him the most recorded guitarist in history — and to shed a little light on the other members, such as Carol Kaye, whose credits are staggering, and drummer Hal Blaine, who played on 32 songs that reached #1.

It’s nice to see these musicians get credit for their body of work, even if it’s belated. In a sense, the movie does for The Wrecking Crew what a documentary and book did for The Funk Brothers, the nickname for a group of session musicians in Detroit, Mich. who played on many of the hit Motown records from 1959 until 1972.

Though the movie’s been well-reviewed at film festivals, the record labels want money for the songs, and that cost has delayed the movie’s release. The screenings are fundraisers, pushing the movie closer to its revenue goal. (There are upcoming screenings in Washington and California.)

I’d like to say that I heard about this documentary on an oldies radio station, or in the newspaper, or somewhere prominent. Instead, I heard about it from a fellow musician. I’m glad he told me, and now it’s my turn to pass it along.

Because this movie and these musicians are excellent, and they deserve to be well-known.

In other words, fluff city.

This morning I happily drooled my way through a two-bedroom one-bath cabin on over five acres of rolling hills and forest in Carmel Valley, Calif., and was somewhere in the bedrooms of a three-bedroom midcentury modern house in midtown Atlanta, when I saw this:

Since I’m a musician, my first thought was, Cool! Nice guitar! But the longer I looked at it, the less sense it made. There are broke musicians whose guitars live in their bedrooms, but electric guitars require cables and tuners and picks and amps. Which is why my bass and its attendant junk live in the den.

I’m just taking a wild guess here, but I’m guessing none of those are in this bedroom (especially since the article mentions that the home owner is an architect, not a guitarist for Bon Jovi).

But hey, maybe they just pulled the guitar from another room and dropped it on the bed. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Otherwise, the bedspread in the center of the photo is pretty darned plain. Plus, all things being equal, if the owner has a cool hobby I’m more inclined to like him.

That thought lasted until the very next picture:

See the guitar on the couch? Here’s a pro tip: The one thing you never, ever want to do with a string instrument is bend its neck, since a bent neck is basically a death sentence for the instrument. Guitarist don’t put their instruments down that way. I wouldn’t even put my guitar or bass down that way to go get a cup of coffee. It’s just too easy to have someone accidentally put weight on it. I have a guitar stand next to the couch. If you have a $760,000 house and a $500 guitar, I suggest coughing up an extra $10 for a stand.

So the guitars may belong to the home owner, but what’s more likely is that the photographer (probably not a musician) is putting them in for visual interest.

All of which wouldn’t even rate a blog post, except that I hadn’t been looking at real-estate porn in a while, so I was a few slideshows behind. After I finished touring the the bargain homes, I moved on up to the ones for $1.6 million.

I was in one of the four bedrooms on the second floor of an eight-bedroom Federal-style mansion built in 1827 in Salem, Mass., when I ran across this:

Another guitar! And it has a practice amp, like someone actually plays it!

Except that again, there’s no cable. And the guitar doesn’t have whammy bar, even though it has a hole for one. And it’s sitting in the chair like a favorite teddy bear.

In other words, it’s just a prop. And a badly used one at that. So let this be a lesson to you, real estate stagers: Once I win the lottery, I am not buying a house if I see an improperly treated guitar in it.

So there.

About superheroes.

As odd as that premise is, that’s the gist of “Superman’s Song” from the Crash Test Dummies. Odder still, the song works. I realize I was a philosophy major, and there’s no accounting for taste, but the song charted in the US and Canada. And its video has been viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube.

Go ahead and listen while you read. It’ll be a multimedia experience!

I like the song for all its improbability, and that it uses characters from comic books and crafts something wise and moving. Instead of the Superman with the giant, gleaming pectorals and impeccable jaw naively fighting for Truth, Justice and the American Way, we get this:

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I’ll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phone booths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

In other words, it’s not always a highlight reel; it’s often a series of small, unglamorous, almost forgotten decisions to do the right thing.

A few months back I played the song for my cousin … and then time passed, events occurred, and I forgot about my Canadian-artist evangelism.

A few days ago, he sent me an email telling me he played the song for his fifth-grade class, and asked them what they thought the song’s message was. Here’s what one boy wrote:

The lesson is to live your life helping people even if you don’t get anything back. One piece of evidence is that “Superman never made any money for saving the world from Solomon Grundy,” but he still continued helping people and that is what you should do even if you don’t get anything for it. “And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.” But I think a lot of people can be like him even if they don’t have super powers.

If you ever wanted to know whether a song works, you can’t ask for a much clearer testament than that.