davidbussick.com

New song. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube, etc. Listen here.

Old friends call
Deck the halls
But there’s no wise man here
No star in the East
But a sign at least
To grow our Christmas cheer
Babe I swear this was meant to be our year

Neon glows
Over snow
The pounding in my chest
My mind adrift
Bearing gifts
I thought we must be blessed
If you know me at all you know the rest

I stepped in the den of one-armed thieves
A sure thing
More joy under our tree
I was up then I was down

It was warm and festive in my head
So I put the rest
Of what I had on red
Then I hitched it back to town

Our Noel
Ring the bell
My debts I have confessed
But will I learn
Or return
I flinch at your request
If you know me at all you know the rest

We did it, Joe. Having freed all women in his own country who were locked up on pot charges, he now turns his confused gaze internationally. God bless our senile president.

Sleeping in, day after Thanksgiving, warm, maybe a little hungover, turning on the news to see videos of people trampling each other at Black Friday sales; don’t see that much anymore.

I have never seen Democrats so united under a common goal. Unfortunately, they’re not fighting Trump, or working for a Green New Deal. No, they’re doing all they can to ensure that Americans continue to die because they can’t afford medical care. Centrists aren’t even trying to hide their contempt for the poor. They’ll embrace fascism before they’ll allow the lower class a better life.

I love to read the latest celebrity news. Celebs are just like us, only better. I don’t read the lowbrow stuff one finds at the supermarket checkout. Just the highbrow stuff for me please. I need to know what smart people think so that I know what to think and what to laugh at and what to find interesting. Here, look at what I read. Are you impressed? Look at what I bought. Do they even have this where you live? Imagine me reading it, smiling, nodding my head, clapping like a trained seal. Sharing this with you is basically the same as writing it myself. Celebs are just like you and me, only better. Well, better than you I mean. I myself could be one, I practically am one right now. If I ever met a really famous one I’m sure it would be my friend.

It didn’t take long to figure out he wasn’t joking. That in itself would have been disgusting enough, but it became even more sickening when it dawned on me that he meant it. He started small – 40% of the students in this school are hopeless, worthless. Trying to reach them is a waste of time. Each time he ran his mouth in front of other teachers- and got their approval in return- he got a little bolder, eventually working his way up to wishing death on these “forty percenters” as he called them. They were beneath him, a waste of space. Most were poor. His solution was to lock the cafeteria from the outside while the students were eating breakfast and gas them, “Auschwitz style.” Most of the kids who ate breakfast at school were from low-income families and therefore worthless. In what will become a common refrain, he wasn’t shy about pinching off his opinions in front of other teachers, and in this and all other instances he got no argument in return.

This was Maestro. Maestro was, on paper at least, a music teacher. Musically, the only interesting thing about him was how bad of a performer he was. I’ve been around a bit since then and I still can’t figure out how dilettantes like him are allowed to stay in positions they aren’t qualified for, how they can pretend to teach kids how to perform without knowing how to do it themselves. This is hindsight speaking, of course. I was just a kid then, and all I heard from other teachers was how “lucky” I was that Maestro had taken an interest in me. Nevermind that everything he “taught” me about performing I had to forget later. I got some incredibly awful advice on how to practice that I had to unlearn. Nothing at all on the mental aspects of preparing for performance (just getting most of the notes right was the goal for him), nothing on how to connect with an audience (because he didn’t know how). He was out of his element and nobody cared.

Continue reading “Maestro”

Sometimes, in my past life, people would ask me about the town I grew up in, and this little fact was a quick way to paint a picture – From elementary through high school, the school district never gave us a day off on Martin Luther King Day, but we did get 4 days off each school year to coincide with the opening of deer hunting season.

Been thinking about teachers lately. Bad ones. More specifically, private teachers and the effect they can have on one’s experience in music school. Whatever my thoughts now on whatever regrets I harbor, part of me is still trying to wring something useful from the experience. It feels odd when I look back on it. You might have 4 or 5 classes in a given semester, participate in a large ensemble or two, have a regular chamber group, and do some ad hoc stuff on the side. Yet this person you see for only a few hours a week can have a bigger influence on you than all that stuff put together. Their methodology, opinions, personality, and biases often drown out the information you get from these other sources.

Anyway, the bad private teachers assume you want to be just like them; the worst of them get hostile when they find out you don’t want to.