Day 22

Day 23

Day 30

Christmas. Yes, with more than a month to go still.

To me, the unconscious marker between the end of Autumn and the beginning of Winter is a record, and a time of day. Have you listened to By The Throat on a cold clear night, walking alone on deserted streets? The Annex is a perfect neighbourhood for this experience: old detached houses, no traffic after 7PM, and very sparse street lighting. Add to this a temperature approaching freezing point and you have your first winter night, ladies and gentlemen. And its most fitting soundtrack. No matter how many times you listen to Ben Frost’s music, it still hits you the same way.

Anyway, Movember… this is the week when the moustache finally came out. And suddenly I look like I’m about 13 again…
More seriously though, if you feel like contributing, this is where you can donate
Thank you!

Day 15

Day 16

Day 17

Day 18

Day 19

Day 20

Day 21

Anyway, back to Movember… there are definitely varying degrees of facial success out there, to which I must sadly report that I wouldn’t really be able to produce a handlebar by month’s end…
Still, there are still 2 weeks to participate, and 2 weeks to donate. You can do so here: www.mobro.co/pepecrudo

And this is what week 2 looked like.

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Day 8

Day 9

Day 10

Day 11

Day 12

Day 13

Day 14

Or I could start a weekly photo diary of my first Movember.

Maybe it was the tumor they took out over the summer. Sure, it’s the most benign form of tumor I could possibly have, but it just plants the possibility in your thoughts that one day it might not be.

Cancer seems to be more present in our conversations, too. People we know, or friends of people we know are currently going through the ordeal I remember all too well, when my grandfather fought for years against thyroid and lung cancers. He had never smoked a cigarette in all his life, just happened to work in a coal mine.

So yes, Movember. Probably the only month of the year when it’s ok to look like a 1970s weather forecast announcer.

You can visit my Movember page, and make donations, right here: mobro.co/pepecrudo

Here’s what Week One has yielded so far. And one important lesson: my facial hair does not grow very fast.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Week 2 is already showing improvement. Currently i’m enjoying the Walter White, or Heisenberg, as I like to call it. But it won’t stop there…

Those are some of the most beautiful days you could ever live.

10 years ago, we woke up in our apartment. Our home. We had decided to move in together over the summer that we had spent apart, and were getting accustomed with the familiarity that comes with it: the imprints of our heads on the pillows, the arrangement of the toothbrushes, the rituals of a shared breakfast. This was the first attempt at domesticity for the two of us, and we were falling in love with the 200 year-old house, its creaking floorboard and large, bright windows.

I had spent the summer worrying that I wouldn’t have been able to return to the States after my one-year (read: non-renewable) contract at Brown. My university clearly wanted me back, yet I wasn’t sure that Lyon was where I wanted to be anymore. But luck has its own ways and sneaks up on you when you least expect it, and all of a sudden things were looking good. I was going to start teaching my own Italian course in Roger Williams University, in a small campus by the water on the way to Bristol.
I remember the first time I took the RIPTA bus to meet the Chair of the department. Trees and water everywhere, old wooden houses and open lawns, people greeting you as you pass them by: Southern New England at its most pleasant and refined.

It was going to be a good year.

We woke up early. The ivy on the window turned our bedroom into a shadow play, golden and green and amber. And blue, blue everywhere: the late Summer sky, the Providence River, the Atlantic. I remember wondering how much blue it would take to ever get tired of it. That Tuesday morning really was magnificent.

And then it happened.

It took a while to make sense of it all. If at all.
A very good friend of ours from NYU stayed at our place for a while. We talked about many things, but not that. Not then. And still our silences would fill the gaps we knew we feared. Life as we knew it had changed. Everything did.
And yet people have to move on, as impossibly painful as it may seem.
And yet people need familiarity. People want normalcy.

For us, it was a cat.

We named our first cat Horatio. Hamlet’s most loyal friend, his survivor and witness.
Horatio was born on the week of 9/11, and welcoming him into our lives seemed to be the one thing that made sense. There was nothing ideological, nothing political: just a black and white kitten, an old house and a creaky floorboard under his tiny paws.

And hope.

A lot of my friends in Singapore went to Baybeats over the weekend. From what I could see, it looked like a good edition, wide-ranging and eclectic. I’m not always a fan of all the bands selected but that’s the point: Baybeats caters to anyone who has a craving for fresh local music in Southeast Asia. And getting to play this festival is one of the highlights of any musician in Singapore.
I was thinking about my Baybeats experience over the weekend, too. 3 years ago my grandmother passed away, only a few weeks before the festival. It had all been too sudden for me to fly back and attend the funeral, and although we did go see her one last time a couple months earlier, I haven’t been back to Messina since. I suppose I need this closure once and for all.
People will tell you it’s a relief sometimes. When you get worse, when you’re in pain, when it just gets too much. And they are right. It still doesn’t take away the fact that you miss the people you love, you miss them terribly.

Shortly after Nonna Antonia’s passing, one of my best and oldest friends wrote to us. His father had been diagnosed with a virulent form of pancreatic cancer. It had already started spreading to the liver. What do you say in this situation? How are you supposed to reassure your friend when you both know that the chances for remission are close to non-existent?
So it was just a matter of months before we received that other email. That other phone call. They always take you by surprise, but you know they’ll keep coming.

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The day after my last Baybeats show I went to the hospital for an operation on my spine. Slipped disc. L5 S1, a classic. Not life-threatening stuff, of course, but still considered major surgery. Recovery was longer than expected, but in the month I spent in bed I composed the bulk of my first album on the laptop. Everyday I would arrange bits and pieces, create loops and sounds for future reference. I figured lower body mobility had nothing to do with that, so I trudged along.

Something grew in my right ring-finger over the past year. I’ve had cysts before, always had them removed. They didn’t really get the whole cyst out the first time, so it grew back at exactly the same place. So I went again, and they took out more. And it went away. There is a slight indentation where the cyst used to be, but it’s in the small of my back, and it doesn’t really bother me at all.
But the finger? for a musician? The problem with leaving that cyst alone is that it will grow too much for a very tight area. The problem with excision is that you will incur nerve damage.
I got that cyst taken out last month. Turns out it was a tumor. They call it Giant Cell Tumor, and on my file it is conveniently abbreviated, GCT. Luckily, this is the second most common type of tumors, and completely benign. But the doctors explained that it can recur, and considering my age group, it probably will, at some point.
No one likes to hear the word tumor. Of course, tumor is not cancer, and I am very fortunate that it is what it is. Still, it’s semantics I suppose, and your brain can’t help but process things a little too much sometimes. What if it were cancer, at some point? What if those chances, those odds, are stacked against you?

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Jack Layton wrote this letter over the weekend. That kind of letter. Read it. And feel inspired by how much more you can do, by how much more there is to do. Jack Layton belongs to this almost too-rare category of politicians whose sense of decency and duty motivated their whole career as civil servants. Civil servants. He loved Toronto, and he loved the Toronto that I have fallen in love with in the past year. And judging from the outpouring of tweets and online messages, this is so far the most significant single event of the year here. Res Pubblica. When was the last time a politician received so much love and respect?
I want to be in the world Layton writes about. I want my children to keep building it after we’re gone.

We only have one shot at this. Better make it count.

Nightswimming captures this joyful nostalgia for the ephemeral like no other song does. The cyclical swirling melody, the impressionistic lyrics, the wondrous string arrangements: you are clinging to these fleeting moments before they are gone forever, but for this one instant, these late Summer nights are all you’ve ever known, tasted, felt, and loved.

10 years ago, Nightswimming became the first song that meant a lot to us. We would joke that I should play it if I ever wanted to propose one day, and we would play it on our own during the months spent apart over the Summer. I recently found a MiniDisc where I had recorded a piano cover for Joanne’s birthday, and as I played it after all these years, I realised that we had never spent a whole Summer together until now.

I can’t remember the last time I had enjoyed Summer that much, in its entirety, for what it really should be. Maybe when I was a kid, and definitely not since University. I’ll write about some of these moments soon, maybe as musical vignettes, much like what Raleigh was, but with a story and pictures accompanying each track. Either way, this long Summer break is exactly what I needed creatively I think. Focusing on something else entirely is all it takes sometimes to get back to work with new perspectives, to remind you why you were doing it in the first place.

Maybe we should all do this…

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?