Feels Like Home Ep #38 Ural Thomas - "Pain Is The Name Of Your Game"

I don't know it, walking through the living room's dim television light. At the end of the tunnel is The House of Entertainment. What I do know is that this is old-time R&B; singer Ural Thomas' place, and that Into The Woods was called here by local history buffs and cultural visionaries The Dill Pickle Club. The plan is to film Ural playing “Pain Is The Name of Your Game,” a big band, deep soul cut originally recorded back in the 1960s. Ural and his wife show us through the muted front house. Exiting the kitchen, we arrive in a long back room full of instruments. A shower curtain with a photo-realistic beach scene hangs over the windows. Oddball decorations mingle with furniture and scattered gear. What looks like a velvet painting of Napoleon overlooks an unironic motivational poster of a lion prowling twin mountain peaks. An image of the Beatles is bordered by one of Bruce Lee. Nearby, a string of white lights corral a display of unframed photographs.  After we load in, details of our session are ironed on the fly.  "I can play it on guitar," offers Ural, "or I could do it on keyboard."  The keyboard version is briefly weighed against an a cappella rendition, and Ural settles on guitar and voice. He wipes the dust from an old acoustic and corrects the strings by ear, bending the notes into a slightly imperfect, traditional tuning. Antique stage lights point from the ceiling to the stool that Ural will later perform from. Audio cables hang from exposed beams and nest on the floor.  Ural is quick to tell us about the room's history. It's the aforementioned House of Entertainment, a practice space and social center, as well as stage to weekly Sunday jam sessions that've been happening since the 60s, back when Ural first moved in. To understand the significance of such a room, you have to imagine a time when venue real estate was limited, local record labels were few, and getting your music in front of people-- especially as an R&B; or soul artist-- was no small feat. Ural knew the realities of the music industry better than most. After singing in churches and street-performing line-ups “as a kid,” as he puts it, he recorded a few songs with a doo-wop group called the Montereys in the 1950s, and soon after left Portland's limited opportunities for greener, urban pastures. A good handful of 45s were recorded in the post-Montereys years (mostly under other artist's names), and Ural began sharing studio sessions with members of The Supremes, Quincy Jones' band, and others, while opening for international names like Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, and Otis Redding. Things were on the up and up. In Seattle circa 1969, Ural was posed to make his break, but a longtime friend and collaborator by the name of Ron Buford took his recordings "down to Hollywood" and sold them as his own. There was no recourse, no way to claim ownership of the songs. With a stabbed back, Ural worked the national circuit-- doing stints in cities from LA to New York-- and after opening for Otis Redding at the Apollo Theater in 1972, he met his manager in Cincinnati. Things got weird, the aforementioned manager got greedy, and Ural headed back West on a borrowed train ticket. He landed in the same North Portland neighborhood he'd lived in since 1955, quietly tending industry wounds. The House of Entertainment, a name originally given to a club in Seattle back in the 20s, took new roots and launched into full swing. The Sunday free sessions became a popular cornerstone. People of all sorts found their way to the room. Ural tells stories about dropping acid with Owsley Stanley (the famed Grateful Dead sound engineer and instrumental figure of the even more famed “Acid Tests”) and describes it as a place where “nobody ever fought, like the Garden of Eden.” It's unclear as to who all played music in the room or crashed in the house, and the reel-to-reel recordings that captured the happenings have been gone since 1974, when the original space burned down in a mysterious fire. The current House of Entertainment has been in a state of construction ever since, and the rebuilding efforts are nothing short of incredible. The brief details: After working days as a bellhop downtown, Ural collected discarded building materials on his walks home. The scraps accumulated to a living space, but in 1977 the city bulldozed The House for code violations. A back and forth ensued-- bulldozing and rebuilding and bulldozing again-- until 1979, when Ural was granted building and plumbing permits, as well as a deed. From the piecemeal drum kit down to the recycled concrete floors, it's a salvaged landscape.  Our sound guy Jeff picks up an Asian sun hat and puts it on his head. He finds a pair of huge plastic lips and holds them over his own. Ural laughs, and I get the feeling that both items come with stories. Everything here does. Rather than ask, I stay seated in the back of the room on an island of couches, keeping my distance fro

THE KING'S SON & THE EMPEROR'S DAUGHTER complete (90 minutes)

a 90 minute collage of text, music and images, based on the lives of rabbi nachman of breslav and salon hostess rahel varnhagen. the lives of these two historical persons overlapped during the first decade of the 19th century. rabbi nachman of breslav founded the breslav hassidic sect in the ukraine, and rahel varnhagen was a salon hostess of the jewish enlightenment movement, known as the "haskalah", in berlin. i combined their biographies and imagined what might have happened in reality and in fantasy if nachman showed up at rahel's salon and attempted to bring the assimilating jews there back to the fold of orthodox judaism. the 90 minute show begins in the style of naturalism and evolves into an expressionistic fantasy being woven by the two main characters, in which nachman projects onto rahel the role of "the shekhinah" ( female aspect of god and also the jewish people in relation to god), while rahel projects onto nachman the role of messiah. so we end up at the end of the show with a fantasy marriage of the jewish people and the jewish messiah at the end of days, without forgetting for a moment that in real life these two never met and as a matter of fact rahel converted to christianity and married the german protestant nobleman august varnhagen. IN THE ESSAYS THAT FOLLOW THE SHOW HAS ITS ORIGINAL NAME, "RAHEL! RAHEL!". I CHANGED THE NAME AFTER I DISCOVERED ON THE NET THAT PAUL NEWMAN MADE A MOVIE WITH THAT NAME BACK IN THE 1960'S. TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD ALL OF MY VIDEOS, PLUS 1500 PAGES OF MY EXPLANATORY ESSAYS (ALL AT NO CHARGE) PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: franklynwepner.com. ALSO PLEASE NOTE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH ME ANY COMMENTS ABOUT MY WORK: franklynwepner@gmail.com. IN THE LISTING OF VIDEOS THE LETTERS (HQ) REFER TO A HIGHER QUALITY VERSION OF THE VIDEO, WHICH IS AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE IT. APPRECIATING MY MUSICAL SHOW "RAHEL! RAHEL!" 1. GENERAL THEORY Of course, the best way to begin to appreciate most works of art is just to experience them a few times and form your own conclusions. The opinions of the creator of an artwork are merely incidental at that stage of the process. And certainly once an artwork is created it takes on a life of its own, just like a child more and more slips out of the control of its parents. Nevertheless, I think we will agree that this particular artwork is unique in its form, what it seeks to accomplish, and the demands it makes on its audience. "Rahel! Rahel!" is an ambitious project which reaches out beyond the realm of art and grapples with major issues of religion and philosophy. Whether I as the author have succeeded in my project is for you the audience to decide, but since my artwork is intended to operate on several different levels I feel it appropriate for me to lay out for you the plan of what might be there for you if I have succeeded in carrying out my original goals. Just as I did not compromise in creating the piece, I will not compromise here in discussing the piece. If you don't "get it", maybe I failed and there ain't nothing there to "get" in the first place. Or if you don't "get it", maybe you need to do some homework on your own, or just give up on it and go do something else more appropriate for your talents. Nachman of Breslav wrote "my Torah is entirely 'b'hinot' ". "B'hinot", in Hebrew, means "aspects of", "associations", "points of view". For example, if I think of vanilla ice cream then I can associate to that idea chocolate ice cream, or cows, or a forest of vanilla beans somewhere in Madagascar. In other words, there is no limit to the range of possible associations I might get. Nachman might have said instead, "my Torah is entirely induction", and then we would contrast inductive logic to deductive logic. Deductive logic begins with a single idea and like an upside down tree follows the ramifications of that idea out into the myriad subdivisions and corollaries of that idea. Scientific textbooks usually are written deductively. Inductive logic begins with the vast realm of concrete living awareness experiences and step by step moves up the upside down tree back to a single encompassing idea that strives to somehow include all of the original experiences in its breadth. Francis Bacon in the 14th century championed inductive logic. Theologically speaking, Breslav kabbalah is inductive thinking, while Chabad kabbalah is deductive thinking. Nachman begins with a wide range of Torah texts and trusts in associative links to get to his main points, while Shneur Zalman, author of the Chabad "Tanya", writes an orderly textbook in which he systematically lays out his major and minor premisses. But both authors are using the same tree style thinking. Nachman moves up the upside down tree, while Shneur Zalman moves down the upside down tree, the kabbalistic tree of life on which the "sefirot" (points of view) are hanging like Christmas tree ornaments. For philosophy in general, this tree is th