crazy experiment

a special exclusive for blog readers!!:

there's a new tune over at right. it's called "emily." it's what i did today! and it has some experimental experiments. i would really appreciate feedback if you have a minute to leave some. even if all you do is make fun of me - i would still be very grateful.

hope you're doing well. over and out.

continuing nerd education

so, music production is a nerd field. it appeals to a wide nerd spectrum, from hi-fi nerds to lo-fi nerds, from nerds with lots of nerd friends to loner nerds.

and it offers a treasure-trove of what i would call "nerd crack:" which is, of course, minutiae. not just any old minutiae, but technical, counterintuitive, obnoxious minutiae that every once in a long while turn out to be really important.

i remember using a program in college called reason, which was really cool (in a nerdy way). it's music creation software, and it's completely digital - you don't need to know how to play an instrument or anything. i remember one guy made a cool (nerd) song totally from sounds he made using a paper bag.

anyway, what made reason so appealing and (nerd-) useful was the knobs. rows and rows of hundreds of little knobs. if you've ever seen a mixing console in a recording studio, you know that there are lots of knobs involved in this process; but in reason, because it was all digital, you could have as many knobs as you wanted. you could build your rack so that the knobs went on to infinity.

and each knob represents a Decision. and most of them don't matter, but some of them do. thus, nerd-crack: you could spend hours and days turning little knobs this way and that to see if they made something cool happen - all while sitting in a dark basement with headphones on, getting paler by the minute.

well, i'd been in withdrawal for a while without really realizing exactly what i was jonesing for. turns out it was something very, very obvious. something even non-nerds recognize and maybe even use: the graphic equalizer.

seriously, how cool is this thing? if you've never played with one, i must insist that you try it. itunes has one. just mess with them while a song is playing and see if you aren't overcome with the giddiness of a schoolgirl as i have been.

of course, this might turn out to be a gateway drug for you - and you could end up a full-blown nerd. after all, you're already reading a blog instead of going outside.

be careful.

i've updated "the pirate song" and might do so again, soon. also "emily" is in the works, an older song that i still like and have never recorded.

here's a mardi gras picture i'm just getting around to posting:



and a poem:


The Red Wheelbarrow


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


William Carlos Williams



Thanks for stopping by.

a tree Full of kids

Hey everyone. I heard some new music today, by a guy called William Fitzsimmons. At some moments his music sounds a lot like what I wish my music sounded like. At other moments his music just sounds really good. These are initial impressions and I invite you to disagree vigorously.

I had a lot of chores today, and I had a little of running around in the park with a dog pulling a leash pulling one arm and a laughing kid under the other arm. I can recommend the latter.

Abbie has a cute haircut and is working hard on the road trip. She would not call it work, though, because she is the product of millions of years of instinctual biological urges, all striving unconsciously to create the perfect road trip-planner. Watching her at it is like watching a great white shark devour a seal, which I have seen on T. V., except not on T. V. and therefore not in slow-motion.

Here's a poem


IN RESPONSE TO A RUMOR THAT THE OLDEST WHOREHOUSE IN WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, HAS BEEN CONDEMNED


I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in the early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?


For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.



James Wright

said Coyote, exasperatedly

More tunes and photos are in the works. Meanwhile, I present two twentieth-century gems with crispy contours and gooey centers:


COYOTE AND THE HEDGEHOG


One day Coyote was walking in the woods when he saw Hedgehog. The hedgehog was hungry, but Coyote didn't know it. But Hedgehog had an idea.

"What are you doing?" asked Coyote.

"I am sitting on my eggs," replied Hedgehog.

"But hedgehogs don't lay eggs!" shouted coyote.

"I do."

"How do you do it?"

"Go get some eggs and sit on them."

"Okay."

So Coyote did this and never ate. Soon Coyote died of hunger. The hedgehog ate him.


The moral is:

Don't listen to hungry hedgehogs.


Abbie Feinstein



Dawn


Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because tomorrow and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.


Federico Garcia Lorca

for a good time

Here's a thought for you: two apes (with no tails) looking at the earth's magnificence in a tiny box. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Yes, Abbie and I have been enjoying the Planet Earth series. Abbie closes her eyes when the predators get close. We both laugh out loud at the sheer majesty of the images. And you just can't help thinking - we are part of this, and yet so not a part of it. I will never see a snow leopard in the wild. So, it's wonderful and mind-expanding. And at the same time it's also just more TV, and it's more of sitting in a room looking at a little screen. As I am still doing. As you are doing.

Well, at least here's a poem for you! The best I can offer.



Forgive My Guilt


Not always sure what things called sins may be,
I am sure of one sin I have done.
It was years ago, and I was a boy,
I lay in the frostflowers with a gun,
The air ran blue as the flowers, I held my breath,
Two birds on golden legs slim as dream things
Ran like quicksilver on the golden sand,
My gun went off, they ran with broken wings
Into the sea, I ran to fetch them in,
But they swam with their heads high out to sea,
They cried like two sorrowful high flutes,
With jagged ivory bones where wings should be.

For days I heard them when I walked that headland
Crying out to their kind in the blue,
The other plovers were going over south
On silver wings leaving these broken two.
The cries went out one day; but I still hear them
Over all the sounds of sorrow in war or peace
I ever have heard, time cannot drown them,
Those slender flutes of sorrow never cease.
Two airy things forever denied the air!
I never knew how their lives at last were spilt,
But I have hoped for years all that is wild,
Airy, and beautiful will forgive my guilt.


Robert P. Tristram Coffin

they got some Crazy little Women there

It gives me great pleasure to report that my mother-in-law is, practically speaking, ready to arm wrestle or drink you under the table, but kindly enough in her spirits to offer you the chance to get beaten at scrabble if you prefer.

Abbie has a new haircut! Get excited:

She would probably prefer that I mention that this photo was taken directly after the fact, when her hair was still full of exotic chemistry, and that she has since soaked her head many times.

Abbie has been entertaining herself by going through her boxes of precious keepsakes. You should know that Abbie has (truly) dozens of these. Often content to be alone, today she got the urge for us to do this together. So she pulled out a box of college stuff and we got to work on the floor of her mom's room. Some of it, of course, is bizarre or embarrassing. Some of it does not ring even a faint bell for either of us. And then Abbie pulled out a manila folder... full of all of our old phone bills. All of them. If you know any mental health professionals in the Kansas City area, please leave a comment.

And the show is Friday. It promises to be the funnest experience anyone has ever had. This despite all of the death, surgery, air travel, and general upheaval of the past week. In fact, historically, there seems to be a direct correlation between those things and the quality of music. Especially if you replace "surgery" with "the drugs they give you after surgery."

If I had to pick a poem blah blah blah forever, it would be this one. I hope you also are electrified by it. Or else just that you have a good day today and get a good night's sleep.


Aubade


I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.



Philip Larkin

have mercy Baby I'm descending again

Dear Loved Ones,

You'll be glad to know that my mighty mother-in-law has emerged from surgery with all her colors flying.

If all went according to plan, Rocky went home with his new mom today.

I have been thinking a lot about something I noticed when we were out playing, as it turned out, on our last day together. We had just taken a run through the park and were in the backyard of the old NOCCA building playing tug-of-war. It was among our most epic battles, with both of us using all our cunning and strength, and it lasted quite a while.

And part of the reason, and this is the thing I noticed, was that Rocky never kept the stick. If he got it away from me, there was not even a split second when he exulted in his victory... not even a flicker of glee in his little beady eye. No trying to get me to chase him, even. Quite the opposite, in fact; he seemed... bored, I guess. Maybe a little deflated. And anyway he stood stock still while he waited for me to get a new grip so the game could start again.

It was all about the struggle, for good ol' Rocky. Nothing at all in the completion.

It reminded me of the summers I spent leading hiking trips out in Rocky Mountain National Park. I remember seeing a shirt that said "somewhere between the trailhead and the peak is the reason." This, clearly, is hiking counselor religion; it's something you try to get the campers to believe, especially on those days when weather (or whatever) keeps you from making the peak. We hike because we like hiking, not because we like bagging peaks, you tell them; even though any idiot can look in their faces and know that, by and large, they strongly dislike hiking and are only coming along because of the chance at making the peak (and because archery was full). The end, and only the end, justifies the means.

Rocky would've been a great camper, although it's true that he trips a lot and is weak on trail etiquette. He's all about the joy of the process. He'd be a good songwriter too. Because sometimes when I think about songs, I mostly want to finish them, even though really the most fun part is the writing itself.

Another reason why thinking about songwriting is so bad and distracting. Better far to write than to think about writing.


It's "Fun with the Scanner" time!

Here's mom, about the time she graduated from Centenary and was married.




Suicide's Note


The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.


Langston Hughes

apple rulez the school

my laptop's back already! who knew that apple's repair service was this awesome?

it's not easy to understand the materials they sent back, but apparently i had an assy heatsink that needed replacing. i was a little offended at first, but now i'm thinking "assy heatsink" is a pretty good album name.

more music and poetry and stuff soon.

waking up in a strange place

dear everyone,

my computer's broke. please enjoy the new tune more than you usually would, if you can, because (a) it might be the last one for a while and (b) the hard drive that contains it will probably be wiped clean by the repair gnomes. i can redo it... but who knows if it'll just get worse and worse from here? meanwhile, like many of my friendships, it exists only in "cyberspace."

joke, joke.

thanks for the chair socks!

so sleepy. but there's a new version of "the pirate song" over there. it's full of goofs - but it's new! enjoy.

your baby'th not thweet like mine (she'th got thoth)

Happy Thoth Sunday everybody! And good job, Eli (not bad for a Greenie).

Heaving Up Our Lives

Dear Internets,

There has been so much going on that I hardly know where to start. Most of you know about my dear mother-in-law's breast cancer. (If you are interested to learn more, not to mention see awesome photographs and read about her efforts to improve the lives of African children, check out her blog.) We're headed up there within a few days to get in everyone's way and generally make nuisances of ourselves.

Also, you will all be happy, and maybe a little sad, to learn that Rocky has been adopted. I guess I should point out that the deal itself has not actually been done, since his new human isn't picking him up till Friday, but in the meantime he is back at SAF getting ready for his new life. We really miss him. But of course are glad he's going to have a permanent home. His new human seems perfect.

I also would like to mention my old comrade who is now a famous movie star. Brooke Lyons was Abbie's roommate freshman year and is a lovely human being. But forget all that! She's pretty! And in a movie with Martin Lawrence! That's what I'm talking about.

And finally, I'd like to announce a new segment on our show called "Fun with the Scanner" in which I scan stuff:

a young Sam, doing what I do best

how you know someone loves you

my parents



Fire and Ice


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.


Robert Frost


We'll really miss you, buddy.