February 29th, 2005

Let start by saying, Jon Rolston Jon Rolston Jon Rolston, in an effort to get googlers of my name to stumble upon this web site. My name isn't anywhere else! I was just told to put my name (jon scott rolston) in the text, so that google can find it and return it as a match. So in order for that to happen, Jon Rolston is going to have to talk about himself in the third person.

I am back from Marc Horowitz's National Dinner Tour, where I secretly spent the time writing the blog for Marc. He was quite busy doing other things, and I am a bit more practiced at writing than him. So let's keep that secret between us. I would listen to him talk, and then I would talk to him, and I would write it all down and ghostwrite. It was a great challenge, since I am so ego-centric, to not write about myself. So thank you Marc Horowitz, for inviting me along on your great adventure! And for those of you who haven't seen it, check out Marc's site, and my blogging skills, at www.ineedtostopsoon.com. Thanks. Your friend, jon rolston. (jon rolston jon rolston jon rolston) Not John Ralston

February 3rd, 2005

The Violin took the February sublet here. She is quiet, in her forties, and seemed like a safe person to have in the house. She plays violin professionally. Down the road a bit at the San Francisco Ballet Company. There are less than a thousand well paid violinists in this whole country. Meanwhile, lots of young people out there are dreaming of being musicians. She is one of the best. Statistically speaking, there are more professional basketball players in the U.S. than professional violinists. Competition is fierce, hands are broken in back alleys by young parents scared of the wunderkind who is playing better than their own natal prodigy. Child musicians who dream of riding horses or playing with dolls are only able to dream, they practice ten hours a day, learning scales. The major and minor scales they know by age two, able to play them according to mathematical equations: “Give me G flat minor, skipping the root every other time, replacing it with an atonal variant of your choice, a diminished 6th the whole way up the fret board, until you descend, then augment the second, natural 6th. What, my child? No. You can watch Barney when you’re 18 and on your own. Right now you are my responsibility.”
The Violin told of her childhood, something similar to this upbringing. She claimed it warped her ability to have a meaningful relationship with a man. Almost to prove it, she slept with her violin, having taken a mortgage out on it. It was worth more than this whole apartment building we live in. It doesn’t have a view of the Golden Gate either. It’s just a little wooden thing from Italy, three hundred years old. She bunched it up in blankets on my big King bed, next to the wall, and she slept guardedly on the outside.
She played for Mercedes and I. Neither of us are very familiar with concert violin or the repertoire it entails, but I watched her play. I saw her whole childhood in her fingertips as they danced and galloped along the strings. I have held a violin once or twice, dragged a bow across it, and saw the strings are in a convex arc. Not flush to my fingers as on a guitar. So to play the low and high string concurrently is not really possible on violin. But there The Violin was, at one point using her bow like it was pure light, so that if she moved fast enough she could bend it and hit all four strings at once. Her right arm perfecting the impossible, while her left hand seemed to have four salamander’s lost tails spazzing out, pulled from the body that is her hand, convulsing in violent backbends, impossible invertebrate flip flops, leaping over and sneaking under one another. It became a beautiful sad thing to see, someone doing something I will never be able to do, right in my bedroom, someone who has told me how sad she is she is able to do this, because of what she lost in the process of gaining this skill. Ten minutes she played, and my eyes welled up, she was giving me reason to not become my best, reason to muddle about, working in a half-assed manner, justifying my common urge to go lay in bed in the middle of a sunny day, or get up from my computer and go pull weeds in the garden. This amazing heartbreaking performance led me to believe that total dedication to one thing will produce results unimaginable, and fuck with a person to the point they are boring or irritating to talk to.
She played so well, without even knowing the music, I loved it. Without understanding what she was doing I knew it was amazing. If my Grandmother watched Tony Hawk on a ramp, she would understand the man is amazing, without understanding what he does. I think it is hard to make a single note sound nice on a violin. My Grandmother is afraid to step on a skateboard. My grandmother and I are un-professionals. We have spent our lives near the home, keeping busy, eating dinner in the evening. Friends stop by, we talk. We drink a little alcohol to spice things up. We are not amazing. We have mastered nothing. It must run in the family. A general distaste for dedication to a craft. No need to work too hard. She’s said it to me at the end of every conversation. “Now don’t work too hard.” God bless her. She can sew wonderfully, but she is not haute. I can write a sentence, but others could write them better. Mediocrity is in the genes, and they are good genes to have.