The First House - Self

The symbol on the wheel for this House is the Eye of Horus, signifying what's visible to the eye.

The First House is mostly about one's face in the world. I have lots of faces. My amazon biker face is above. My pro musician face is just left of here. I've been a member of the SF Bay Area-based "Gonzo Celtic" band Annwn, in one or another of its many incarnations, for five years. It's been, as another local band would say, a long strange trip (in fact, one of the stranger trips connected with Annwn was playing the wedding of that selfsame band's guiding light the year before he died...).

I was born in Berkeley, California, on 31 July 1961. (For the astrologically-minded among yez, it was at 9:52 AM. Daylight Savings Time, and Herrick Hospital in Berkeley is at 37 51 49 N, 122 16 13 W.) I started playing music in grade school, and studied viola clear through my college days. Then I dropped it because it had stopped being fun, though I continued to write songs and play guitar in a half-assed sort of way. I put out four cassettes of my own music, for which I still get occasional requests (sorry, they're all WAY out of print). Then I ran into Elton at a party -- I'd known him for a while, peripherally through these same parties -- and we got to talking about music, and it turned into my visiting him to play music, where he discovered that I could play fiddle if pressed. As I gradually remembered the days I spent playing Celtic music (mostly busking on bodhran with piper Shawn Folsom) and hanging out with the Institute for Celtic Studies, and that music could be fun and exciting, the memories and the music-making turned into a band. Now the fiddle I play is usually an electric one...